Category Archives: Registry Development

Technical Issues, The Registry!

New Host

Since the beginning of the project, we’ve been running our own web server. After a significant number of local service outages on the part of Time Warner this year, particularly in July, we finally decided that had to change.

As of today, we’re running on Dreamhost. Dreamhost isn’t perfect, but they offer a nice package of services, reasonably good support and, with the right promo code, the price was right. So we’re going to give it a try for a while.

Moving from a host where we had complete control of the Apache and MySql servers to a shared host where we don’t has required some minor configuration changes to the blog and the wiki, and some significant changes to trac and subversion, but no changes to the Registry. As a side effect of the wiki tweak, we can have prettier URLs — http://metadataregistry.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page becomes http://metadataregistry.org/wiki/Main_Page. Links will default to the new style, although the older form will still work in order to keep older bookmarks working too.

We updated trac and subversion to the latest stable releases, moved trac from a lighttpd server to Apache and moved subversion from a subversion server to Apache as well. This has changed the user authentication process for both services, hopefully for the better.

The Registry!

Registry update

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We made some major/minor changes to the Registry software last week. If you’ve used it lately you may have noticed the fairly ugly tabs that replaced the links at the top of the browse pages. They still need some work, but it’s generally a lower priority than some other things.

The major change was reworking a significant amount of the Registry code to bring it up to the Symfony 1.0 release. We’d been working with a fairly ancient version of Symfony while waiting for the final and as a result there were significant structural changes required. We also wrote a bunch of automated functional tests so that we can be a bit more confident that future releases will have fewer bugs. You shouldn’t notice any of this when using the Registry, but please let us know if we broke anything.

We cleared up a few small existing bugs, one of which was that the Registry was a little too aggressive in checking to see if a prefLabel was unique, so the check is now local to the Vocabulary instead of the entire Registry. Another was that under some circumstances the URIs generated by the Registry Sandbox had a hard-to-see double slash after the base domain, causing the URIs to fail to resolve properly. In addition to fixing the bug we also fixed all of the bad existing URIs.

More updates are imminent.

Controlled Vocabularies, Registry Development

Who are we doing this for, anyway?

Building any kind of functioning service requires an initial assemblage of assumptions. Who’s the user? What do they expect in the way of service and interaction? Where do we start to engage them in the enterprise? I’ve always been a strong believer in diverse work teams, with a variety of backgrounds and experience brought to the table. Of course the messy part of diversity comes when there’s a need to come to some consensus about priorities and approaches.

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Registry Development

New SOA Registry from Infravio

Infravio has released X-Registry Platform 5 and I wish we could get our hands on this and take it for a test run. Looks like it might be a great model for both the Registry and the MMS. According to the article, the cost is $125K to $175K, which seems a bit expensive, but does indicate the overall organizational value of this kind of service and I assume the expected ROI.

Continue reading New SOA Registry from Infravio →