netzooid

Mark Little recently posted a summary of a debate on whether or not governenace for the web is different then typical SOA governance.

Stefan Tilkov left a comment* that I think is worth highlighting as I heartily agree with it:

To me, governance is about defining and enforcing rules in the interest of a better overall result. This seems a good idea regardless of any particular architectural or technical approach. What’s somewhat contrarian to WOA (hate that term) goals is the idea of having a central authority. But why is this a necessity? I think governance can be de-centralized, and if it is, it works perfectly with a more web-like style.

Also, the InfoQ article quotes Dan Foody:

How can a provider make it easier to on-board customers and keep them happy (all while changing the service frequently)?
How can a consumer establish and build trust in their service provider (that’s trust as in “trust but verify”)?

I think governance tools need to help answer these questions for all types of services/architectures. Whether things are centralized or decentralized, and wether you’re using a SOAP/WSDL approach, a RESTful approach or are doing other types of services.

With our next version of Galaxy, we’ve been at least adressing this first point. We’re trying to ensure that you can use Galaxy as a registry for any type of service - RESTful services, JMS, TCP, SOAP, etc. Inside Galaxy you can create pure metadata entries which represent services. I could write about it, but I suggest you just click on the screen shot.

You’ll see that you’re able to start capturing a whole host of metadata around services such as

• Business information
• Contacts
• Documentation
• URLs/entry points to access the service

If all this information is in a central, searchable place, it becomes much easier to on board customers.

This leaves the issue of trust. I’m a little unsure as to how a tool can build trust. Galaxy allows you to attach lifecycle information so you can see if a service is in production, is deprecated, etc. However you still need to trust the person who created this information.

Galaxy 1.1 should be out sometime this month. In the mean time, please try one of our snapshot builds - we’re pretty much just cleaning things up at this point.

* InfoQ: please give us comments feeds!!! I love your site, but I never remember to come back for discussions.