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h1. What is Petals Master?

Petals Master is an open-source Web application that allows to register and manage services (in the SOA sense of the term).
Note that the name "Petals Master" is an alias for the [Dragon|http://dragon.ow2.org] platform, which is supported by the [OW2 Middleware Consortium|http://www.ow2.org/].

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As a SOA repository, Petals Master can manage services, organizations, roles and establish relations between them.
Petals Master also aims at managing the life cycle and the versioning of services (from its creation, going through its development, to its end-life).
In a next future, it will also be possible to define Service Level Agreement (SLA) contracts and associate abstract policies.

Anyway, Petals Master is expected to play a major role in the use and the promotion of SOA best practices between service providers and service consumers.
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h1. Main Features

Petals Master supports 4 aspects:

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Petals Master can be queried through Web services.
It currently supports 3 API:
* *UDDI Inquiry v2*.
* *UDDI Inquiry v3*.
* A custom Inquiry (not yet but soon) API.

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The management of *service's life cycle* and *SLA (with WS-Agreement)* is planned but not already available.
Please, note that the application is available in English and soon in French\!


h1. Software and Hardware Requirements

Petals Master being a Java Web application, it can run on any application server (e.g. [Apache Tomcat|http://tomcat.apache.org/]).
As a Java application, you imperatively need a Java Virtual Machine to run it. More precisely, you need a JDK 6.

Eventually, you need a database (several types are supported) and a Web browser.
More details about Software and Hardware requirements are given in the [installation guide|Installing Petals Master].


h1. License

Petals Master is licensed under the terms of the [LGPL License|http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html].


h1. Where can I get the source code?

The *source code* for Petals Master can be found on the [OW2 Forge|http://petalsmaster.ow2.org/source-repository.html].