Another SOA piece falls in place

JBOWS, or Just a Bunch of Web Services, is far more prevalent than SOA, but vendors are taking the first steps toward helping companies' systems to become less spaghetti-like and more service oriented.

Evidence of this is Oracle's latest announcement with Systinet, a vendor specializing in UDDI-based registries. The two companies just announced an agreement in which Oracle will embed Systinet's SOA registry within Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. The partnership will provide Oracle customers tools for service discovery, service governance and service lifecycle management across the enterprise.

Registry is one of the key ingredients needed to make SOA work, along with an orchestration mechanism (likely BPEL), full process testing, and management/monitoring tools. UDDI is seen as the most popular option for registry, which will help producers and consumers of services determine what services exist within a particular network. Systinet Registry, based on UDDI, captures service description and usage information into a centrally managed and searchable location.