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
Improved registry level transaction Support.
Improved Support for deploying on top of Application Servers other than tomcat like WebSphere, WebLogic, and
JBoss.
Saminda Wijerathna the lead of the WSO2 tooling team, announced the release of a new version of IDE tools for WSO2 WSAS and BPS. These tools will help you to write web services or web service clients and test them within your Eclipse IDE.
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).
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.
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.
WSO2announced the release of the revolutionary series of products introducing a componentized design to implement SOA in cost effective and simple manner.
Data services support – Expose you enterprise data as a services in a jiffy
WSAS IDE – Eclipse IDE integration
Clustering support for High Availability & High Scalability
Full support for WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-Policy and WS-Secure Conversation and XKMS
EJB service provider support – Expose your EJBs as services
Axis1 backward compatibility – Deploy Axis1 services on WSAS & Engage advanced WS-* protocols in front of legacy services
JMX & Web interface based monitoring and management
WS-* & REST support
GUI, command line & IDE based tools for Web service development
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)- WSO2 ESB is a lightweight and easy-to-use Open Source Enterprise Service Bus based on Apache Synapse. Here is the listing of some of key features,
Proxy services – facilitating transport, interface (WSDL/Schema/Policy), message format (SOAP 1.1/1.2, POX/REST, Text, Binary), QoS (WS-Addressing/WS-Security/WS-RM) and optimization switching (MTOM/SwA).
Non-blocking HTTP/S transports based on Apache HttpCore for ultrafast execution and support for thousands of connections at high concurreny with constant memory usage.
Built in Registry/Repository, facilitating dynamic updating and reloading of the configuration and associated resources (e.g. XSLTs, XSD, JS, ..)
Easily extended via custom Java class (mediator and command)/Spring mediators, or BSF Scripting languages (Javascript, Ruby, Groovy, etc.)
Built in support for scheduling tasks using the Quartz scheduler.
Load-balancing (with or without sticky sessions) /Fail-over, and clustered Throttling and Caching support
WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, Caching and Throttling configurable via (message/operation/service level) WS-Policies
Lightweight, XML and Web services centric messaging model
Support for industrial standards (Hessian binary web service protocol/Financial information exchange protocol)
Enhanced support for the VFS/JMS/Mail transports
Support for message splitting and aggregation using the EIP
Database lookup and store support with DBMediators with reusable database connection pools
JMX monitoring support
WSO2 Registry – WSO2 Registry is a user-friendly, but comprehensive enterprise resource / metadata management solution. It is capable of
Storing and managing arbitrary resources and collections
Tagging, commenting and rating
Managing users and roles
Authentication and authorization on all resources and actions
Resource / collection versioning and rollback
Advanced search capabilities – tags, users, etc.
Built in media type support for common types (WSDL, XSD)
Dependency management – maintain relationships between dependent resources
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
Activity log and filtering support for the activity logs
Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) support for reading/writing the data store remotely
Subscribe to directories, comments, tags, etc. with any standard feed reader (Bloglines, Google Reader, etc)
Java client for remote access via APP
Embedded and WAR deployments
Web based user interface with Web 2.0 look and feel
WSO2 Business Process Server (BPS) – WSO2 Business Process Server (BPS) is an easy-to-use open source business process server that executes business processes written using the WS-BPEL standard and it’s powered by Apache ODE (Orchestration Director Engine). It provides you the following features,
Deploying Business Processes written in compliance with WS-BPEL 2.0 Standard and BPEL4WS 1.1 standard.
Managing BPEL packages, processes and process instances.
Data Sources support.
External Database support for BPEL engine.
WS-Security support for business processes.
WS-RM support for business processes.
Caching support for business processes.
Throttling support for business processes.
Transport management.
Internationalized web based management console.
System monitoring.
Try-it for business processes.
SOAP Message Tracing.
Web Services tooling support such as WSDL2Java, Java2WSDL and WSDL Converter.
Customizable server – You can customize the BPS to fit into your exact requirements, by removing certain features or by adding new optional features.
All these products are pre-bundled components built on top of WSO2 Carbon framework which is based on the OSGI technology. In fact you can bundle the components to suite your enterprise architecture as all the major features have been developed as pluggable Carbon components.