SOA repository, built quickly and on a low budget

One of the greatest complaints about service orientated architecture is the complexity involved in installing and managing registries/repositories at the core of the service directories. But there is a quick, cheap, open-sourcey way.

In a new InfoQ article, Ben Wilcock of SOA Growers Ltd describes how he has built a quick, lightweight registry for SOA projects: what he calls it a "Simple Service Repository," or a way to share SOA artifacts over the Web.

1. Create a Java web application (the Simple Service Repository application) using Maven: "By far the best thing about this Simple Service Repository is that it's really just a Java web application with a bit of Maven thrown in to help with the contract standardization, contract centralization and contract-first development.

2. Build the Simple Service Repository application and deploy it to an application server: "You need published changes to your repository's content to be instantly available to everyone wherever they are...  Glassfish 3.1 is my personal application server of choice for Java web applications (but other servers would work just as well). Once deployed, the Simple Service Repository's content will be instantly available via a browser."

3. Build a Web Service implementation from a contract hosted in the Simple Service Repository: "You want it to be easy to create contract-first implementation of your web service contracts and once more Maven comes to the rescue...The rest is plain sailing - normal boilerplate JAX-WS service implementation code."