It seems that this article has attracted commentary from at least one
blogger:

<<Let me try to make sense of the contribution of registries to SOA
first. The author of this article quotes that "registries hold
references to things". That is right. Registries hold metadata of
services and other interesting things. But this article fails to say
why and how it helps SOA. As I discussed here, in most applications,
registry is a development-time component, but not a runtime component.
Developers intending to make use of web services can search
repositories to find services that match certain classification
criteria. Once a service is found, the next step is to build a client
application in the old fashioned way - i.e. start with some codegen
tool to generate interfaces/classes that proxy the service, and then
program to those interfaces/classes. This is the old-fashioned way of
wiring up distributed applications. The only exception is when the
client already knows how to use the service, and consulting the
registry only to know the where-abouts of the service.

So registries can be useful when the client wants to be directed to an
instance of a service based on some runtime criteria such as QoS, fail
over etc. Some web services management (WSM) tools advertise such
"dynamic routing" as one of the main features of their products. The
difference between the old-fashioned style of fail-over and
load-balancing and the new age dynamic routing is the ownership of
routing. For instance, in the HTTP world, proxy servers do the
routing. In most RPC style applications, client consults some look-up
service (such as a JNDI or a naming service) to do the routing. In
this context, I don't see much difference between the old-fashioned
load-balancing and fail-over to the new age dynamic routing. The role
of registries in this context is not as phenomenal as the author of
this article is hoping for. Moreover, WSM-controlled routing has its
disadvantages. I will post more about these limitations in a future
post.>>

You can find this blog at:

http://www.subbu.org/weblogs/welcome/2005/07/soa_a_shot_in_t_1.html

Gervas

--- In service-orientated-architecture@yahoogroups.com, "Gervas
Douglas" <gervasdouglas@y...> wrote:
> <<There's a deafening buzz in service-oriented architecture around
> repositories, which appear to be emerging as a core component of
> SOA. What is actually emerging, says Miko Matsumura, is an
> integrated registry-repository model, which could serve as the core
> technology of what amounts to an SOA platform.
>
> "Up to now, SOA has mostly been about point-to-point Web services
> integration," Matsumura tells SOATrends. "If you're connecting one
> point to another point, there's no need for any kind of platform.
> It's really just a cat's-cradle kind of series of connections
> between everything and everything else. But people are starting to
> get interested in connecting things in a way that creates direction,
> coherence or intention."
>
> Matsumura is the former vice president of product marketing at
> Systinet, co-creator of The Middleware Company's SOA Blueprints (the
> first complete, vendor-neutral specification of an SOA application
> set), and the original Java evangelist at Sun Microsystems.>>
>
> You can read this article at:
> http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=11427
>
> I am sure the great man himself would be happy to answer your
> observations and questions on this.
>
> Gervas