A Humane Registry
One of the things which has often baffled me about Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) is the idea of some kind of registry. It’s a common sight in architecture diagrams and serves the role of tying together service providers and consumers in some automated (and ideally automatic) way.
In practice, of course, there is hardly ever a foolproof way of determining whether a service is appropriate to the needs of a consumer. Sure, it may implement the correct interface, but is it actually the correct implementation? What has happened in every case I have encountered is one of two things: (a) each interface only has one implementation, the directory lookup becomes trivial, and all that smart matching software sits idle, or (b) the registry or the protocol is manually hacked to force particular consumers to associate with particular service implementations, in which case all that smart matching software just gets in the way.
Martin Fowler describes an alternative, the “Humane Registry”.
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