Three ways of using WSO2 Registry

In my previous post, I blogged about the 0.1 release of WSO2 Registry. Below are three simple ways of putting it in use.

Registry server with the cool web UI

This mode of usage is targeted at end users who want to organize and manage their enterprise/organization around the Registry. You can start this with virtually zero steps. Just drop the wso2registry.war file in to an application server and you are done! Now point your web browser to the URL http://localhost:8080/wso2registry (you have to use the port of your application server). You will get the web UI of the Registry, from which you can perform all the operations supported by the Registry.

Now you can keep on adding resources, categorizing them using collection, creating users/roles, granting permissions for users to access only the required operations on required resources, etc. So that is the initial administration step. Once you create necessary administrative users and roles, you can open up the Registry to your organization (and probably to your partners as well). Then sit back and watch how your enterprise's registry grows as users fill in content, tag them, comment on them, rate resources.... Basically Registry provides the infrastructure for building a community from your organization's members (and partners) who collaboratively builds and manages the resources of your enterprise.

Registry as a Java library for building content oriented applications

Core of the Registry can be embedded in Java application as a jar file. It provides an API through which all the features provided by the Registry can be accessed. So what is the use case of this... It serves as the back end to build applications that need to store and manage any content. In addition, your application automatically gets all the tagging, commenting, rating, versioning,... features. Plus, the comprehensive permission scheme on all the resources stored in the Registry. We, at WSO2 has used this Registry core to build the community site for WSO2 Mashup server. You can find a perfect example of building a Web 2.0 style community site using the WSO2 Registry library in the Mashup community site.

Registry to host remote content for applications

WSO2 Registry provides a remote API using APP. Currently it provides a Java APP client for the Registry API. You can embed this client in your Java applications and use WSO2 Registry as a remote content repository for your applications. This can serve as a great method for clustered deployment of content oriented applications, where all applications can be pointed to the same Registry for synchronizing the content among all nodes. Then all your applications get the community features mentioned above as well. As the Registry is running in the server mode in this case, you can simply use the web UI to administer the content of distributed applications.

As it uses the APP as the wire protocol, it is not restricted to Java. Programs written in any language can process the APP based protocol mentioned here and access the Registry remotely.

This is very high level overview of the uses of WSO2 Registry. Each of the scenarios mentioned above has more application specific usages. Start playing around and discover how it suits your organization or the application.