[uplat] relationships service rewrite

[Heather Kreger <kreger@us.ibm.com>]

Here is my relationships service rewrite:
1.1.1 Relationship Service
1.1.1.1     What?

A relationship repository or registry which may be responsible for
creating, inventorying, tracking, and validating relationships. This
service may or may not be a participant in the relationships. If
relationships are rule based, then it would also be responsible for
altering relationship members based on the rules. This would include
portType operations for querying, adding, finding, and validating
relationships. This service would build on the Relationships feature above.

1.1.1.2     Why?

Understanding relationships is an integral part of the responsibility of
many types of managers. Solution installation, availability, and problem
determination management applications need to understand the relationship
of a resource to be installed, which has had status changes, which has
failed, to other resources in the environment. Some relationships are known
by the resource, and the resource be able to be queried about the
relationship directly.  Some relationships are created by a larger scoped
view/application, like installation requirements, and the resources in the
relationship are not aware that they are participants in the relationship.
In this latter case, a third party relationship manager may create and
maintain the relationship. This is one case for a relationship manager
service. Another case for a relationship manager service: sets of
relationships are supplied by managed resources and relationship managers,
it may be easier for a manager to traverse the relationships and detect
inconsistencies and relationship integrity problems if there is a central
relationships manager service which accumulates and connects all the
relationships so that the relationships of the environment can be searched
and traversed without causing significant network traffic doing distributed
searches and traversals. A sophisticated central relationships manager
service may also be a control point for changing relationship which drives
changes onto the actual relationships and resources in the relationships.

1.1.1.3     How?

Perhaps this is a management domain problem.


Cannonical interface for a relationship manager service.
Heather Kreger
STSM, Web Services Lead Architect for SWG Emerging Technologies
Author of "Java and JMX: Building Manageable Systems"
kreger@us.ibm.com
919-543-3211 (t/l 441)  cell:919-496-9572