Introduction

The EMBRACE registry is a collection of life-science web services originating from the EMBRACE Network of Excellence. As a potential user of these, you can search the registry for services that match your needs, and find example client software to help you use them in your own programs or workflows. The registry periodically monitors the status and behaviour of the registered services, collating and logging this information so that you can see how reliable services are, and whether they are currently functioning as the service providers expect them to.

How The Registry Works

Authors of web services submit a description of their service to the registry, along with optional functional and conformance tests. Functional tests are simple client scripts that connect to a web service, ask it to perform some operation, and then test to see whether the results are as expected. These can be written in a number of popular languages including Python, Perl and Java. Conformance tests examine the service in detail to see whether it uses standard ‘best practice’ techniques.

Service Status Icons

Each service in the registry is given a service status that gives an overall indication of the health of a particular service. Broadly speaking the statuses can be interpreted like this:

Unknown. All services start of with the unknown status. This means that the registry knows about the existence of a service, but hasn’t yet been able to test whether that services works.

Ok. A green ‘Ok’ status means that as far as the registry is concerned, the service is behaving correctly.

Warning. The amber ‘Warning’ status means that the registry has detected something unusual about a service’s status; it is probably still functioning in some form, but you should be cautious about relying on any results you get back from the service whilst it is in this state.

Error. The red ‘Error’ status means that the registry has not been able to communicate with the service recently.

Because of the nature of distributed services, the status icons represented by the registry can’t guarantee to be completely up to the minute and definitive. The interpretation of the statuses just described is a good day-to-day indication of what’s going on, but to completely understand what the statuses mean, and what implications this may have for your own client programs, you should read the full status descriptions.