WSO2 Cloud Middleware

WSO2 Cloud Middleware

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SOA Workshop, Santa Clara, CA

I will be conducting the session on SOA Enterprise Architecture Patterns

The Anonymous Software Architect

A nice advertisement from WSO2 for recruiting software architects in Sri Lanka :)

WSO2 Governance Registry 3.0.0 Released

WSO2 Governance Registry team is pleased to announce the version 3.0.0
release of WSO2 Governance Registry. This release is available for
download from here[1].

WSO2 Governance Registry is a user-friendly, comprehensive enterprise
governance, registry and repository solution available under the Apache
Software License v2.0. It is pre-loaded with best practices to help
users with governance adoption. WSO2 Governance Registry is fully
integrated to the WSO2 Carbon platform with the 3.0.0 release. This
allows WSO2 Governance Registry users to benefit from the flexibility
and extensibility provided by the Carbon platform. This can be either
used as a complete product or used in combination with components of
other WSO2 products. User specific components, extensions or UIs to the
WSO2 Governance Registry can be easily added as Carbon components.
We are striving for a simple and happy first time user experience as
well as a satisfying experienced user experience with this release.

Features of WSO2 Governance Registry

* Intuitive User Interface
* Advanced service governance through, discovery, impact analysis,
versioning and automatic extraction of service metadata
* Dashboard support with gadgets with design-time and run-time
governance information
* Advanced Life cycle management with checklists
* Validation policies. e.g. WSDL Validation, WS-I Validation and
Schema Validation
* Dependency management - maintain relationships between dependent
resources for impact analysis
* Managing users and roles
* Authentication and authorization on all resources and actions
* Activity log and monitoring with filtering support for the activity
logs
* Eventing and notifications
* Subscribe to resources, collections, comments, tags, etc. with any
standard feed reader (Bloglines,Thunderbird,Google Reader,RSSOwl, etc)
* Storing and managing arbitrary resources and collections
* Supports remote links, symbolic links for resources
* Tagging, commenting and rating
* Resource / collection versioning and rollback
* Advanced search capabilities - tags, users, etc.
* Built in media type support for common types (WSDL, XSD)
* Attach remote WSO2 Governance Registry instances, providing one
interface for many WSO2 Governance Registry instances
* Pluggable media type handlers for handling custom media types
* Support for processing custom URL patterns via pluggable URL handlers
* Support for custom query languages via pluggable query processors
* Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) support for reading/writing the data
store remotely
* Java client for remote access via APP
* Import/export resources and collections
* Based on the OSGi based WSO2 Carbon architecture. This is a
unification of all Java based products from WSO2.

Project Resources

* Home page : http://wso2.org/projects/governance-registry
* Library : http://wso2.org/taxonomy/term/924/all
* Wiki : http://wso2.org/wiki/display/registry/home
* JIRA-Issue Tracker : https://wso2.org/jira/browse/registry
* QA Artifacts :
Wiki : http://wso2.org/wiki/display/registry/Quality+Assurance
SVN : http://wso2.org/repos/wso2/trunk/commons/qa/registry

Installation and Running

1. Extract the downloaded zip file
2. Run the wso2server.sh or wso2server.bat file in the /bin directory
3. Once the server starts, point your Web browser to
https://localhost:9443/carbon/
4. Default Username/password for admin account is admin/admin

Known Issues

1. This release doesn't support clustering
2. Remote WSO2 Governance Registry API doesn't support User Management

Reporting Problems
Issues can be reported using the public JIRA available at
https://wso2.org/jira/browse/registry

Contact us
WSO2 Governance Registry developers can be contacted via the mailing lists:
For Users: registry-user@wso2.org
For Developers: registry-dev@wso2.org

Alternatively, questions can also be raised in the Governance Registry
forum:
Forum http://wso2.org/forum/351

Training
WSO2 Inc. offers a variety of professional Training Programs, including
training on general Web services as well as WSO2 Governance Registry,
Apache Axis2, Data Services and a number of other products. For
additional support information please refer to
http://wso2.com/training/course-catalog/

Support
WSO2 Inc. offers a variety of development and production support
programs, ranging from Web-based support up through normal business
hours, to premium 24x7 phone support.

For additional support information please refer to http://wso2.com/support/

For more information on WSO2 Governance Registry, visit the WSO2 Oxygen
Tank[2].

Thank you for your interest in WSO2 Governance Registry
-The WSO2 Governance Registry Development Team-


[1] http://dist.wso2.org/products/registry/3.0.0/wso2greg-3.0.0.zip
[2] http://wso2.org

WSO2 Carbon 2.0.0 Released

WSO2 Carbon 2.0.0 - Middleware a' la carte

Welcome to the WSO2 Carbon 2.0.0 release.

WSO2 Carbon is the base platform for all WSO2 Java products.
Built on OSGi, Carbon encapsulates major SOA functionality
such as data services, business process management, ESB routing/transformation,
rules, security, throttling, caching, logging and monitoring. These product
capabilities are no longer tied to individual products, but are available as
components.

This release is available for

download at http://wso2.org/downloads/carbon & contains a basic Carbon server runtime.

You could build up you server by installing new features onto this base.

A Carbon feature consists of one or more Carbon components. These are
nothing but Eclipse Equinox P2 features. In order to extend the functionality of
you Carbon server, simply install new features onto you server as outlined in
https://wso2.org/wiki/display/carbon/p2-based-provisioning-support

Key Features

* Extensible OSGi component based architecture
* P2 provisioning based feature enhancement of the server
* Unified server management framework
* Unified Management Console
* Web service, JMX & Equinox OSGi console based administration
* Integrated security & permissions management

New Features In This Release

1. Experimental Equinox P2 based provisioning support -
extend your Carbon instance by installing new P2 features
See https://wso2.org/wiki/display/carbon/p2-based-provisioning-support
2. Fixed start levels eliminated
3. Performance improvements to the Registry
4. Ability to make normal jar files into OSGi bundle
Just copy the jar files into CARBON_HOME/repository/components/lib
5. Various bug fixes & enhancements including architectural improvements
to Apache Axis2, Apache Rampart, Apache Sandesha2 , WSO2 Carbon &
other projects, including security fixes


How to Run

1. Extract the downloaded zip
2. Go to the bin directory in the extracted folder
3. Run the wso2server.sh or wso2server.bat as appropriate
4. Point you browser to the URL https://localhost:9443/carbon/
5. Use "admin", "admin" as the username and password.
6. If you need to start the OSGi console with the server use the
property -DosgiConsole when starting the server

For more details, run, wso2server.sh (wso2server.bat) --help

How to Install Additional Features

You can build your own server by selecting only the features that you require
For further details refer to
https://wso2.org/wiki/display/carbon/p2-based-provisioning-support

Known Issues

All known issues have been recorded at https://wso2.org/jira/browse/CARBON
& https://wso2.org/jira/browse/Carbon

Training

WSO2 Inc. offers a variety of professional Training Programs, including
training on general Web services as well as WSO2 Carbon, Apache Axis2,
Data Services and a number of other products.

For additional support information please refer to
http://wso2.com/training/course-catalog/


Support

WSO2 Inc. offers a variety of development and production support
programs, ranging from Web-based support up through normal business
hours, to premium 24x7 phone support.

For additional support information please refer to http://wso2.com/support/

For more information on WSO2 Carbon, visit the WSO2 Oxygen Tank (http://wso2.org)

--
WSO2 Carbon Team

Final Releases of Carbon based Products

Some of us have been blogging for the past few months about a revolutionary way of building middleware products called Carbon. There were also several blog posts about preview releases, beta releases & release candidates of Carbon based WSO2 Products. There was much enthusiasm amongst the community about how the final products will turn out to be. Wait no more! Yesterday, we released the final packs of

• WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS) 3.0
• WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) 2.0
• WSO2 Registry 2.0
• WSO2 Business Process Server (BPS) 1.0

Of course, you can have the features in one product running on an instance of another product. You can mix-n-match your requirements with the available feature set. We will shortly make available feature packs which will allow you to extend the feature set available on a particular product instance.

Like all releases from WSO2, these product releases are also fully open source and are available under the Apache Software License 2.0.

Feel to download these products, try them out and provide feedback.

WSO2 Elevator Pitch

A short & sweet introduction to WSO2

Making great SOA!

WSO2 Carbon Beta Releases

1. WSO2 WSAS 3.0 Beta 2 -
http://dist.wso2.org/products/wsas/java/3.0-beta2/wso2wsas-3.0-beta2.zip

2. WSO2 ESB 2.0 Beta 2 -
http://dist.wso2.org/products/esb/java/2.0-beta2/wso2esb-2.0-beta2.zip

3. WSO2 Business Process Server 1.0 Beta 2 -
http://dist.wso2.org/products/bps/1.0-beta2/wso2bps-1.0-beta2.zip

4. WSO2 Registry 2.0 Beta 1 -
http://dist.wso2.org/products/registry/2.0-beta1/wso2registry-2.0-beta1.zip

Once you download, extract the products;
1. Start $CARBON_HOME/bin/wso2server.sh
2. Management Console URL https://localhost:9443/carbon/

QAing Open source SOA middleware products

In traditional open source projects, there is no formal QAing involved and it is the responsibility of the developers themselves to carry out this task. Due to the collaborative nature of open source software development & the participation of a wide and diverse community, the quality of open source projects tends to be higher than closed source, proprietary projects. However, as a company which provides support for open source SOA middleware products, WSO2 has to ensure that all our product releases go through proper QA cycles before being shipped. The mindset required to test middleware products is different to the mindset of testing end-user products. This is because, the majority of the end users of middleware products are developers who write applications for other 'real' end users. The other end users include system deployers & administrators.

One of the biggest challenges we faced in early 2006 while trying to recruit Quality Assurance (QA) Engineers to test WSO2 middleware products was finding personnel who can write code to exercise all the features in our products. In reality, it is very difficult to find QA Engineers or testers who have the ability to write code which tests SOA middleware products. There are so many standards & specifications involved, hence these personnel have to first get a good understanding of these specifications & standards & then write tests which exercise the products. Traditionally, in most cases, I've seen testers having a spreadsheet with them, running the test cases using some product UIs and simply recording the status of the test; pass or fail. This process is automated later, and then there are stress & load tests. The testers, at most, write some test scripts using some kind of testing framework. In the case of middleware products, the UI is only a minor portion of the product. Middleware run the code developers write. Like I mentioned earlier, most of the end users of middleware products are developers who write applications for other 'real' end users. Hence the testers have to wear the developers' hat in order to effectively test middleware.

After searching for QA Engineers with the right attitude, we were able to put together a team of QA engineers. Over the past couple of years, this group of people has developed into an elite team ably led by Charitha Kankanamge. His blog is used as a reference by thousands of developers who use our middleware products world-wide, and contains intricate technical details related to various technical topics. This team works very closely with the developers. If you look at some of the blogs of other WSO2 QA Engineers such as Evanthika & Krishantha, you will notice the level of technical competence & knowledge our QA engineers demonstrate. Some of these QA Engineers also happen to be Apache committers. Their contribution is one of a main reasons for the high quality exhibited by our products. We follow an agile & lightweight QA process at WSO2, which doesn't impose unnecessary overhead. I've seen some QA teams blindly trying to follow heavy weight processes and losing site of the real goal of QAing; ontime delivery of high quality products. Undoubtedly, this is the best team of QA engineers I've come across in my career. The facts that things always work out of the box for our users & no major issues have been reported by most of our users bears testimony to this.

3 years at WSO2!

I joined WSO2 exactly 3 years ago, on 1st December 2005. There were only around 15 employees at that time. After changing 3 companies in 2 years, I was finally able to find happiness & satisfaction at WSO2 :) So 3 years seems to me like a long time :) The work has always been challenging & rewarding. The WSO2 team is undoubtedly one of the best in the world. I was part of the team that did several pre-1.0 Axis2 releases and was also a core member of the WSO2 Tungsten team, which went on to become WSO2 WSAS. I've seen WSAS grow up from its infancy to become a highly useful & sophisticated piece of technology; the forthcoming WSAS 3.0 release shall bear testimony to this statement. I've also seen WSO2 go through several phases of its growth. I also got the opportunity to contribute to several other leading open source projects such as Apache Synapse, Apache Axiom, Apache Rampart & WSO2 Registry. The culture at WSO2 is so much different to those in other Sri Lankan IT companies. The open nature & transparency, in terms of software development as well as other aspects definitely keeps me motivated. I've learned that the open source software development model is one of the best software development models. The community driven development, agility & collaboration leads to high quality software.

I've always felt that WSO2 is my second home.

WSAS 3.0 - Some screenshots

Figure 1: Logging Management


Figure 2: Service Dashboard


Figure 3: SOAP Message Tracer


Figure 4: System Statistics


Figure 5: Services List


Figure 6: Message Flows


Figure 7: System Logs

Wanna see a preview of WSAS 3.0? Download it!

2 minute introduction to WSO2 Carbon

Nice blog entry by Samisa on WSO2 Carbon. You could understand what we are trying to achieve with Carbon by just having a look at the pictures in that blog post.

WSO2 WSAS 3.0 alpha preview

Figure: System statistics dashboard


Figure: Service Information & Management dashboard

Expect the rock solid, WSO2 Carbon architecture based WSO2 WSAS 3.0 release in the coming months. WSO2 Carbon is a modular architecture based on OSGi. You could easily extend your server by downloading extra components or by even writing your own components.

Do you want to have proxy services & service mediation support in WSAS? Just download the proxy services & service mediation Carbon components & drop them into your running server. You do not have to restart your server. Of course you could easily write or search for a component that will extend your featureset.

If you'd like to keep track of the progress of the WSO2 Carbon project, subscribe to the carbon-dev mailing list. We will be doing a number of frequent milestone releases to get valuable feedback from our user community. The final release is going to have a very exciting set of features. So stay tuned!

New look for wso2.com

The WSO2 website has got a total makeover. It is one of the simplest & nicest looking sites I've seen. It clearly conveys what WSO2 is all about; it is the open source SOA company, which provides products & solutions that allows others to create services, connect systems, compose new processes & govern their SOA infrastructure & systems. This means, WSO2 solutions cover the entire SOA spectrum.

WSAS Enterprise Deployment

I've written a post on how WSO2 WSAS as well as other open source SOA products from WSO2, The Open Source SOA Company, fit into your enterprise deployment.

WSO2 ESB 1.7.1 release

Ruwan Linton, one of the leading developers on WSO2 ESB & Apache Synapse, has blogged about the recent WSO2 ESB 1.7.1 release.

This release can be downloaded from http://wso2.org/downloads/esb/

WSO2 WSAS (Web Services Application Server) Blog

We recently started a blog on WSO2 WSAS which will highlight the various ways in which WSAS can be used in an enterprise deployment as well as other aspects of WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS). An expert group of contributors will be contributing content to this blog.

Comprehensive ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) Tutorial List

Samisa has compiled a comprehensive list of tutorials on the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). In fact, this list can be considered a one-stop shop for ESB tutorials.

The WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an ultra fast, light-weight and versatile Enterprise Service Bus based on the Apache Synapse ESB. It allows you to Connect, Manage and Transform service interactions between Web services, REST/POX services and Legacy systems.

The list of articles shows how you can address several enterprise integration scenarios & concerns using WSO2 ESB. One article in particular may interest enterprise & SOA architects. This article titled "One of the Largest Managed Care Organizations Exposes its Mainframe Data & CICS Transactions using WSO2 Middleware" provides a real-world case study about one of the large health care organizations in the United States which is using WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) & WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS) in production.

The first ever product release from WSO2!

A picture with a lot of historical value... This picture was taken soon after the very first product release from WSO2; WSO2 Tungsten 1.0-alpha (now known as WSO2 WSAS). This was the very first team that worked on WSAS. Only 2 members from this initial team still remain in WSO2. The rest have left to pursue higher studies. This post is a tribute to all those former team members.