BEA acquisition beefs up SOA repository

BEA Systems has agreed to acquire privately-held Flashline for an undisclosed sum.

Flashline develops a metadata repository for service oriented architectures (SOAs), offering a single place to store information about service components.

SOA is designed to build and maintain applications in an enterprise. Rather than designing applications from the ground up, SOA allows developers to reuse code between departments and combine resources from all over the company.

The repository holds information about dependencies and relationships between service components, preventing developers from breaking an application when they tweak one or more components.

A repository is similar to a Universal Description Discovery and Integration service registry.

Both store information about services, but as enterprises start to implement SOAs repositories are used increasingly for development purposes and as registries to store the information required to deploy them.

"The registry is more and more viewed as the place where end-point information and interface definition and binding type policies are kept, which is separate from the rest of the information needed to look at things like analysis, and deployment type architectures," said Paul Patrick, chief architect of BEA's AquaLogic.

BEA already offers a registry and will maintain both its registry and Flashline's repository. The Flashline product will be integrated into BEA's Aqualogic SOA offering.