netzooid

Today we’re announcing, among other things, the first release of Mule Galaxy which is our “SOA governance platform with integrated registry/repository.” (whew - thats a mouthful)

We’re exploring what it means to bring open source tools and governance together. Governance has typically been a game for those with lots of cash at hand with registries typically costing hundreds of thousands to a million or more dollars. Open source breaks down that barrier and makes it much more approachable to everyone. And there’s a lot of reasons it should be approachable as governance can be very valuable. For instance, governance tools can help you:

• Gain visibility into services across your organization and collaborate on them
• Manage an artifact or service’s lifecycle more effectively
• Gain visibility into and control over who is consuming your services, schemas, etc.
• Enforce best practice policies across your services like you would across your build with Checkstyle or PMD.
• Manage the security of your services more effectively through policies
• Easy manage configurations, schemas, WSDLs, etc for deployed clusters of machines

Yeah, but what is it?

At Galaxy’s core is an artifact and metadata repository which can store whatever you want in it. Mule configurations, WSDLs, schemas, WS-Policy documents, etc are all recognized by Galaxy out of the box and it can store unrecognized artifacts like zips or jars too (although soon these will be recognized). Galaxy allows you to manage your artifacts by versioning them and organizing them into workspaces.

The magic starts to happen with the layers on top though.

Indexing: Galaxy includes the ability to index artifacts and extract metadata from them for easy searching. For instance, I can search for Mule configurations with a mule service or a WSDL with a particular portType or for policies which should be applied globally or for an xml schema with has element Foo inside it.

You can also build your own indexes with XPath or XQuery expressions which is quite handy.

Metadata: You can associate any type of metadata that you want with an artifact and search on it.

Galaxy query language: Galaxy has an SQL-like syntax for querying artifacts based on their metadata and content. For instance you could do:

select artifact where mule.descriptor = 'HelloWorldUMO'

select artifact where wsdl.portType = 'HelloWorldPortType'

select artifact from '/Policies/Global' where documentType = {http://www.w3.org/2006/07/ws-policy}Policy

Policy Enforcement: The ability to apply enforce policies across artifacts in the repository. For instance, included is support for policies which:

• Enforce WS-I BasicProfile compliance on your WSDLs
• Require that Mule configurations only use SSL encrypted endpoints
• Enforce WSDL backward compatability
• And of course the ability to extend it and write your own.

Dependency management: See who is consuming your artifacts so that you may make informed decisions about the future development of them.

Lifecycle management: Galaxy provides some workflow-like features so that you can take appropriate actions at various points in an artifact/service’s lifecycle.

Integration: Included is integration with a number of open source products including Mule, Apache CXF and Spring. With Mule you can discover and find your necessary configurations - all you need is a URL which queries Galaxy to boot Mule. With CXF you can build a set of runtime policies and apply them to your services. We’re also working on building out a number of other plugins including one for Microsoft’s WCF framework which will be released soon.

AtomPub API: So if you were all wondering what got me started on AtomPub, this is it. We represent workspaces, artifact version histories and comments as AtomPub collections. Artifacts can be queried with AtomPub using the above query language (http://host/api/registry?q=select artifact ….).

To read more about how we represent artifacts and their metadata using AtomPub, check out this page.

And of course we use Apache Abdera More on this topic later as I have a lot of thoughts about the strengths and limitations of AtomPub in this scenario.

Feedback

We have a number of other cool features planned for the near future as well. But just as importantly we need your feedback. Please check it out and let us know what you think. What would convince you to deploy this inside your organization? What governance features are you looking for (if any)?

For more information see:

• Feature overview
• Screenshots
• User’s guide
• Downloads

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Random.