The WSO2 Governance Registry (G-Reg) is a SOA-integrated registry-repository for storing and managing data or metadata related to service artifacts and other artifacts. It provides a rich set of features including SOA governance, lifecycle management, and a strong framework for governing anything. For more information on the features and functionality of WSO2 Governance Registry, go to WSO2 Governance Registry.
Eschewing the complexity (and WS-* focus) of specs like UDDI, the Governance Registry uses Atom Publishing Protocol (via Apache Abdera) to offer a standard and simple RESTful remote interface, which can be accessed easily by custom code, feed readers, and browsers. It has been designed to both encourage "grass-roots" community around your data and also to allow for IT-friendly governance.
WSO2 Governance Registry is fully open source and is released under Apache Software License Version 2.0, one of the most business-friendly licenses available today, and is an on-going project. It undergoes continuous improvements and enhancements with each new release, to address new business challenges and customer expectations. WSO2 invites users, developers and enthusiasts to get involved or get the assistance from our development teams at many different levels through online forums, mailing lists and support options. We are committed to ensure you a fulfilling user experience at any level of involvement with the WSO2 Governance Registry.
You can use WSO2 Governance Registry either as a complete product or in combination with components of other WSO2 products. User-specific components, extensions or UIs to the Registry can be easily added as Carbon components.
Main functionality
WSO2 Governance Registry main functionality falls under the following two categories.
Content repository
The content repository virtually can hold any type of content. But in order to give prominent support for SOA-type services, it is cased as follows:
- Special UI to capture both technical and non-technical details related to the services
- Separate upload UI's for Policy, WSDL and Schema, which are tightly related to SOA type services
- Built-in validation for Policy, WSDL and Schema
Governance framework
The governance framework embodies the following set of governance features which allows you to govern the artifacts stored in the content repository.
- Define any type of governance asset
- Customizable repository extension points, executable via manual intervention (aspects) and by the framework (handlers) along with relevant evaluation criteria (filters)
- Integrated with 3rd party products and external systems
- Repository APIs: JCR
- Registry APIs: REST, UDDIv3, JAXR
- Governance APIs: REST, Atom/AtomPP, SOAP
- Centrally integrated with the latest version of WSO2 Enterprise Store 2.0 and WSO2 API Manager
- Create and manage registry resources, APIs and Swagger instances with the newly introduced Governance Centre UI
- Installation provision for API-M, enabling API publisher and store functionalities, including API creation, publishing, subscription, token generation and regeneration within WSO2 Governance Registry
- Graphical differentiation view to compare two inter-related assets
- New asset association UIs and extension point to perform add/remove associations based activities
- Improved extension points to write tasks based on registry API and governance API
Governance Artifacts
There are two broad categories of artifacts found in the WSO2 Governance Registry as follows.
Resources
A resource is any artifact from WSDL files to XML, Word/Excel documents, JPEG Images, etc. Every resource in the WSO2 Governance Registry becomes a center for social activity.
Collections
A collection is a group of resources that falls under a logical entity, and are stored within WSO2 Governance Registry.
Using Governance Registry
WSO2 Governance Registry provides three main Web based user interfaces to facilitate the features and functionality as follows. For information on accessing these Web interfaces and on the usage of them, see Running the Product and Architecture.
G-Reg Publisher
The G-Reg Publisher provides an end-user, collaborative Web interface as shown below, for governance artifacts providers to publish artifacts, manage them, show their dependencies, and gather feedback on quality and usage of them.
G-Reg Store
The G-Reg Store provides an end-user, collaborative Web interface as shown below, for consumers to self-register, discover governance artifact functionality, subscribe to artifacts, evaluate them and interact with artifact publishers.
Management Console
The Management console is a Web-based user interface powered by JSP and AJAX as shown below.
Updating service details
Service resources are stored within /governance/services. Monitoring/querying of the location /governance/services gives vision of the services registered within Governance Registry. Another option is to enable notifications (e-mail, SOAP, HTTP POST) for this repository location. For advanced users, Governance Registry supports writing custom handlers for given media types.
There are two ways to update the Governance Registry with service details as follows.
Using Governance Registry's UI
If you choose the first way and add a service bearing the name "OrderRegistration" with the namespace as org.acme.services, a resource will be created inside /governance/services/org/acme/services/OrderRegistration with application/vnd.wso2-service+xml as the media type.
Uploading WSDL
Similarly, you can upload a WSDL to the system and Governance Registry will automatically create a service resource under /governance/services collection. Additionally, if a given service has WSDLs/Schema/policies, Governance Registry will automatically upload them and create associations between related artifacts(resources).