SOA development governance simplified by centralized policy management |
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By Rob Barry
28 Jul 2009 | SearchSOA.com |
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Running with the message that application development problems caught early are exponentially cheaper to fix, Web services vendor WebLayers has added a number of features to simplify the use of its newly released SOA lifecycle governance tool, WebLayers Center 5.0.
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You really have to win the hearts and minds of the developers because, at the end of the day, they're the ones who need to be governed.
John Favazza
WebLayers
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With features like auto-correct policy compliance and centralized policy management, the company says the product's new release will make governance easier on both developers and IT managers.
"That's what we found people were doing," said John Favazza VP of engineering at WebLayers. "They were governing only at runtime. They were saying, 'we have all these services that don't fit our corporate standards. Let's go back and fix them.'"
WebLayers focuses specifically on governance for the software development lifecycle. Features in the version 5.0 release include federated active policy management, distributed automated governors, a conformance center and a new dashboard.
Favazza said the theme of this release is centralizing policy management alongside distributed administration and validation.
"We're seeing this fairly common where people have to disconnect from the server and work from home," said Favazza, "or where some development operations are outsourced overseas."
As such, Favazza said WebLayers has simplified its policy management system so that it is all controlled from one area. Administrators can now access and make changes to policies on the fly and have them cascade throughout the entire development platform.
In addition, the process of federation allows an architect to tell policies to behave differently depending on where they are being executed.
"But you really have to win the hearts and minds of the developers, because at the end of the day, they're the ones who need to be governed," said Favazza. This led WebLayers to include a number of ease-of-use features like automatic suggestions to make the code comply with standards and a library of 2,000 out-of-the-box policies.
Not meant as a stand-alone product, Favazza said WebLayers Center 5.0 is designed to plug into middleware from IBM (Rational and WebSphere), HP and Oracle.
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