Blogger: Anne Thomas Manes
Way back in April 2005, Systinet (now a part of HP) announced the Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF), which proposed to define standard formats and practices to enable interoperability among SOA infrastructure ecosystem products (service platforms, mediation systems, and management systems) via UDDI. At the time Systinet recruited about a dozen SOA infrastructure vendors to participate in a partnership to implement support for GIF in their products. Most of these vendors implemented at least some support for GIF by mid 2006. But the program remained a proprietary partnership. Other registry vendors (e.g., Infravio and SOA Software) were not invited to participate in the program. I was very disappointed with the closed nature of the effort, and I railed repeatedly on Systinet to publish the specs in a public forum.
Now, nearly three years later, HP has finally published the Governance Interoperability Framework Reference specification. I've only given it a quick glance, but it appears to provide enough information to enable other UDDI-compliant registry vendors/users to configure their systems to act as a GIF hub. It also provides enough information for other infrastructure vendors to use GIF to exchange service metadata, policy, and management information.
The publication is not quite as open as I'd like -- you must register with HP and forfeit private information to gain access to the document. But at least it does not require acceptance of a license agreement or signing any type of partnership agreement. And the Copyright Notice is quite benign:
Copyright Notice
Copyright © 2008 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.
DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTEES. USER ACKNOWLEDGES THAT THE SPECIFICATION MAY HAVE
ERRORS OR DEFECTS AND IS PROVIDED "AS IS." HEWLETT-PACKARD MAKES NO EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND WITH RESPECT TO THE SPECIFICATION, AND
SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, EVEN IF THAT PURPOSE IS KNOWN TO HEWLETT-PACKARD.
LIMITATION OF LIABILITY. HEWLET-PACKARD SHALL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY LOSS TO ANY THIRDS PARTIES CAUSED BY USING THE SPECIFICATION IN ANY MANNER
WHATSOEVER. HEWLETT-PACKARD SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT,
SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, WHETHER BASED ON CONTRACT,
TORT OR ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY, ARISING OUT OF ANY USE OF THE SPECIFICATION OR ANY PERFORMANCE OF HEWLETT-PACKARD RELATED TO THIS SPECIFICATION. USER FURTHER ACKNOWLEDGES THAT THE SPECIFICATION IS PROVIDED FOR EVALUATION PURPOSES ONLY, AND USER ASSUMES ALL RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH ITS USE.
GIF defines a model that supports information exchange based on UDDI (v2 or v3, but v3 is recommended to enable subscription capabilities), WS-PolicyAttachment, and WS-Management. It supports information exchange related to service management, policies (constraints, configuration, and capabilities), dependency relationships, consumers and providers, property information, and management metrics. All-in-all, quite a valuable document.
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