Getting Started with WSO2 Governance as a Service

In this tutorial, Dimuthu Gamage, Technical Lead at WSO2, guides you on how to get started with WSO2 Governance as a Service.

Date: Mon, 16th Nov, 2009
Level: Introductory
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Dimuthu Gamage
Sofware Engineer
WSO2

Introduction

WSO2 Governance Registry helps you to store and manage SOA meta data of your organization. You can download the latest version of WSO2 Governance Registry from here.
Governance as a Service (GaaS) is an online instance of WSO2 Governance Registry with a multi-tenant (multi-organization) support. So users don't need to download and deploy the package, rather they can use the online instance to govern their SOA platform.

In order to use WSO2 Governance as a Service instance, you first have to create an account for your organization. Click the 'Register' button in the WSO2 Governance as a Service home page to get into the Register Organization form.
Getting into the Register Organization form:

Here, you have to fill the following fields,
- Domain : This should be a domain registered with your organization. (Currently, we are not validating the domain ownership, but we will suspend the use of invalid domains in the near future).
- Admin Username: The username of the admin account
- Admin Password: The password of the admin account
- Admin Password-Repeat: Re-enter the password typed above.
- Email: Your email address. We will use this email to contact you for any updates.
- Word Verification: Enter the letters shown in the captcha image in this text box.
When you submit the form to add a new organization, you will receive an e-mail along with the instructions you need to follow to activate your account.
After you have successfully created the account for your organization, you will be redirected to the login page. The page URL will be in the following structure
http://governance.cloud.wso2.com/t/yourdomain (E.g. for example.com the URL is http://governance.cloud.wso2.com/t/example.com)
Please bookmark this URL, as this is the page that all the users of your organization should use to sign in to the WSO2 Governance as a Service instance.

Once you have created an account, Go to the URL http://governance.cloud.wso2.com/t/yourdomain (Here the yourdomain should be replaced with the domain you registered with, E.g. for example.com the URL is http://governance.cloud.wso2.com/t/example.com)
Enter the username and password values that you had entered to register the organization to sign-in to the admin account of your organization.

When you login to your account for the first time, you will see the direct links to add your first service, wsdl, schema or policy.

From them click the 'Add new Service' button. This will direct you to the 'Add Service' page. You can reach to the same page by clicking the Metadata->Add->Service menu from the left handside menu bar.
Fill the name and a namesapce for the service which are declared as required fields. Note that the fields of the form is highly configurable. (You can configure the fields by editing the Service UI configuration xml that can be reached from Configure->Service. This topic is not covered in this section of the tutorial.)
If there is a WSDL describing the interface of your service, you can mention the URL in the 'WSDL URL' field.
Once you submit the form, Governance Registry will import the dependencies of your service including WSDLs and XMLs Schemas to the registry.
Visit the Metadata->List->Service, Metadata->List->WSDL, Metadata->List->Schema to view the created service and the dependent WSDLs and Schemas.

Click the 'Add' button at the bottom of the lifecycle panel to engage the lifecycle with the service.
This will give you the information about the state of the lifecycle and the checklist that needed to be checked to promote the service lifecycle to a higher state.
After you have checked all the checklist under a particular state, the 'Promote' button will appear. When you click the 'Promote' button, the lifecycle will be changed to a higher state. You can lower the state of the lifecycle by clicking the 'Demote' button.

One of the key aspects of SOA governance is the ability to share service interfaces with various parties in a consistent and orderly manner. After you have successfully stored the resources (WSDLs, schemas and policies, etc.) in the governance registry, you can provide the locations of the service interfaces and the service meta data, to refer them from different applications or to share with third parties. For example WSDLs inside the WSO2 Governance Registry can be used to publish Web services with Web services engines like WSO2 WSAS or create proxy services with WSO2 ESB.
Each resource is associated with a unique path in the context of registry. You can always visit the path from the registry browser to update, delete, move, copy the resources. Visit the registry browser guide to learn more about this.
Every resource in the registry will have a unique RESTful URL. The URL will have the following structure.

HTTPS URL: https://governance.cloud.wso2.com/t/yourdomain/registry/resource/wsdlpath1
HTTP URL: http://governance.cloud.wso2.com/t/yourdomain/registry/resource/wsdlpath1

E.g.
For domain: example.com and wsdl: /example/path/example.wsdl
HTTPS: https://governance.cloud.wso2.com/t/example.com/registry/resource/example/path/example.wsdl
HTTP: http://governance.cloud.wso2.com/t/example.com/registry/resource/example/path/example.wsdl .

You can add/remove users for your organization and control their access using the User Management page in WSO2 Governance as a Service. You can access it from Configure->User Management menu from the left menu bar.
To create a new user, follow the links Users->Add New User.
To create a new role, follow the links Roles->Add New Role. When creating a role you will be prompted to select permission to the role.

By carefully selecting the permissions, you can control the access to the users who belong to that role.