Dimuthu’s Blog

WSO2 has released new versions of their SOA platform products including WSO2 Governance Registry, WSO2 Identity Server, WSO2 ESB, WSO2 Web Service Application Server. This is a major version upgrade of these products introducing many features.

ESB:

• Priority based mediation through priority executors
• WS-Discovery support and dynamic endpoint discovery
• Message Relay for efficient pass through of messages
• Component manager to install and uninstall features (provisioning support)
• Common Internet File System (CIFS) support through the VFS transport
• File locking functionality in the VFS transport to support concurrent polling
• Smooks mediator for efficient message transformation
• Enrich mediator for smart message manipulation
• OAuth mediator for 2-legged OAuth support
• Default endpoint UI
• Hot deploy and hot update configuration elements (sequences, endpoints, proxy services etc)
• Transport level statistics collection and monitoring
• POX security support
• Dependency detection and alerting for mediation configuration elements
• Mediation statistics API and custom mediation statistics consumers
• Multiple certificate/identity support in the NHTTP transport sender
• Improved logging capabilities for the NHTTP transport
• Templates based proxy service development in the UI
• Dashboard to monitor server environment and runtime
• Easy creation and management capabilities for dynamic sequences and endpoints
• Pagination to service management, endpoint management and sequence management UIs
• Obtaining resources like WSDL’s through web proxy servers

Governance Registry

• Gadgets for impact analysis on services and registry resources
• WSDL custom view
• Dynamic Handler configuration
• Handler simulator
• Tree-based Resource view
• API to govern SOA artifacts
• Complete Web Services API for Registry
• Improved options for Service discovery
• WS-Discovery support
• Scripting support for lifecycle management
• Improved P2 based provisioning and feature management support
• Support for adding remote mounts
• Platform, and Group/Cluster based deployment model
• Support for multiple server instances
• E-mail verification for subscriptions
• Support for deleting tags and comments
• Support for PostgreSQL and DB2 DBMS
• Paged activity and resource search
• Hierarchical permission model with granular and extensible permissions
• Ability to upload metadata (in addition to importing)
• Governance Archive for uploading WSDLs and Schemas with imports
• Ability to update resource content by uploading
• Rich text editor for editing text resources
• XML editor for editing handler, lifecycle and service UI configurations

Web Service Application Server (WSO2 WSAS):

• Component Manager – The UI tool to install/uninstall Carbon featrues.
• Various bug fixes & enhancements including architectural improvements to Apache Axis2, Apache Rampart, Apache Sandesha2 , WSO2 Carbon & other projects.
• Equinox P2 based provisioning support – extend your WSAS instance by installin new P2 features. See P2 based provisioning in WSO2 Carbon
• Hierarchical service support for Axis2 services, JAX-WS services, Spring services & Jar services
• Report generation for deployed services

Identity Server:

• SAML 2.0 based Single Sign-on support
• OAuth Support
• Support for bulk-user import
• Various bug fixes and enhancements including architectural improvements to Apache Axis2, Apache Rampart, Apache Sandesha2 , WSO2 Carbon and other projects.

WSO2 announced an another round of release of their famous SOA products.

• WSO2 Governance Registry 3.0.1
• WSO2 ESB 2.1.1
• WOS2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS) 3.1.1
• WSO2 Identity Server (IS) 2.0.1
• WSO2 Mashup Server 2.0.0

Although the version numbers say this is minor patch release (Other than the Mashup Server which is shipping as a major release), in fact there are new features and improvements. Some basic new features shares among all of these products are

1. Improved registry level transaction Support.
2. Improved Support for deploying on top of Application Servers other than tomcat like WebSphere, WebLogic, and
   JBoss.
3. Support for Eclipse P2 based provisioning. (Yes, you can add/remove features from these WSO2 products , see https://wso2.org/wiki/display/carbon/p2-based-provisioning-support for more details)
4. Improved Remote Registry model

WSO2 -An open source middleware company- announced the release of bunch of their SOA enabling products along with Carbon 2.0.0 which is an OSGI based unified platform that all the WSO2 java products are built on.

• WSAS (Web Service Application Server) – Provide and consume web services, data services with full WS-*, REST support, GUI tools, Integration with Eclipse, etc..
• ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) – Message routing, mediation, transformation, logging, task scheduling, load balancing, failover routing, event brokering, etc. with number of transports support
• Governance Registry – Govern you SOA platform, introducing number of new features including Dashboard with Gadgets, lifecycle management with checklists, eventing and notifications, remote/symbolic links, checkin/checkout functionality and new meta data management UI.

You will be able to get the advantage of the carbon platform by extending the functionality of any of these products, just by mixing components from other products (Just like running an ESB within WSAS).

Download, Play around with them and Enjoy:)!!!

Apache Stonehenge, A project to demonstrate the interoperability between heterogeneous platforms has done their first milestone release few days back.

The first milestone demonstrate the interoperability between

1. .NET – Microsoft WCF implementation
2. Java – WSO2 Web Service Application Server (WSAS) implementation
3. PHP – WSO2 Web Service Framework for PHP (WSF/PHP) implementation

Each of these technologies has implemented a Stock trader application with Business Service, Order Processor and Trader Client components. You will be able to assemble the application by mixing components from any of the above implementations.

It provides you a great sample on using basic web services features (SOAP, WSDL etc..) and WS-Security across the above platforms.

If you are interested, you can download the sources and binaries from here, http://www.apache.org/dist/incubator/stonehenge/. Installation guides and other documentations can be found from here, http://cwiki.apache.org/STONEHENGE/

Early this year, WSO2 released a complete SOA platform, introducing a revolutionary solution to adapt SOA in more flexible and cost-effective manner. It is developed based on the OSGI technology, which allow users to get only the desired components to their requirements and implement their SOA infrastructure. As the requirements grow or change, they can add/upgrade/drop only the relevant component(s) to adjust to their new requirements.

In fact rather than releasing each components separately, WSO2 released few products, pre-bundling some of these components.Those are,

• WSO2 WSAS – Allows you to consume create and host web services.
• WSO2 ESB – Complete ESB functionality including message routing, mediation
• WSO2 BPS – Orchestrate business processes with WS-BPEL
• WSO2 Registry – The repository for all.

Note that you can always start from one of above and then mix and match among these components until you get the desired features, as explained in my previous blog The Composable SOA Platform.

One of the common component bundled in all of these is the “Registry Core”. It acts as a unified repository for all the storage requirement of the SOA platform. It stores,

• Service descriptions, policies
• Configurations of modules (e.g. Security module, Reliable Messaging module, etc..)
• Configurations of transports
• Configurations of data sources, event sources, connections
• Proxy Services, Sequences, Endpoints +  the keys (xslts, schemas) needed in mediator configurations.

In order to deal with these requirements Registry provides functionalities to

• Store/Retrieve resources.
• Organize resources in to collections(collections are also considered as resources) in hierarchical manner. (Like directories in a file system)
• Search resources. (content based search or using custom queries)
• Tagging, commenting and rating resources
• Keeps associations, dependencies among resources
• Support for resource versioning.
• Monitors activities.

So how you going to use the registry. In fact you can access a registry in different ways. It has

• Nice web based GUI to explore/add/remove/update resources
• APIs to embed the Registry to your java program.
• APIs to access Registry remotely using Atom/pub and web services. Atom clients are also available in C and PHP to access registry.

The another very important aspect of the registry is that who has the permission to view/add/delete resources. For that, registry uses ‘User Manager’ component which allows you to handles the permission in user based and role based schema.

In addition to all of these functionalities, it provides you two different ways to extend the functionalities of the registry.

• Handlers
• Aspects

Please look at this article on “Extending WSO2 Registry” for a comprehensive guide on this subject.

The capabilities of the registry are not just limited to act as a repository, but also it can be used as the base for govern the entire SOA platform. The following aspects of the SOA governance can be solved based on a Registry.

• Service discovery
• Service policy enforcement and validation
• Service Life Cycle Management
• Promote or Demote services with a proper criteria (e.g using a checklist)
• Service association and dependency management
• Service Monitoring
• Service Access Control
• Service Versioning

You can read how to implement SOA Governance with the Registry 1.1 (An Older version of Registry) in more detail, from this article “SOA Governance with Registry 1.1“.

WSO2 is preparing to release the WSO2 Governance Server that provide a solution to all of these SOA Governance requirements. It will extend the registry features and UI by introducing more views towards SOA Governance.

So you can use WSO2 Registry for all your repository requirements + as a tool to help you govern your SOA in your enterprise.

The release of WSO2 SOA platform – Carbon has unified the process of development to deployment of SOA in several aspects. Here is a list of 5 aspects unified across all the components of the SOA platform namely WSAS (The App Server), ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) and BPS (Business Process Server)

1. Unified QoS configurations – Allows you to add/drop modules for security, reliability, etc of your services + edit their policies in a unified view.
2. Unified Registry Storage – Provides a unified view over the governance of the SOA platform.
3. Unified Trackers – Availability of logs, statistics, graphs and  message tracers making it easy to debug and test your system.
4. Unified User Experience – Well designed unified User interfaces allowing admins/users to get familiar with each of the components very quickly and easily.
5. Unified Extensibility – The underline OSGI environment and the design of the carbon platform itself make it possible to add new OSGI bundles as extensions to fit equally across all the products.

The WSO2 SOA platform comprises of

• Application Server (WSO2 WSAS) – Enables you to provide and consume web services
• Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 ESB) – Enables you to mediate web service interactions
• Business Process Service (WSO2 BPS) – Enables you to orchestrate services for your business process.
• Registry (WSO2 Registry) Enables you to store and govern your resources.

The uniqueness of WSO2 platform is that it provides you the freedom to mix and match these components according to your requirements. Paul Fremantle, CTO of WSO2 describes this as a Composable SOA platform. You can drop ESB component to BPS instance to add mediation capabilities to your business process server or the other way around.

In the following screencast Ruwan Linton – Product Manger of WSO2 ESB explains how to get the mediation capabilities inside a web service application server, putting ESB component in to WSO2 WSAS and demonstrating their integrated operations.