Dimuthu’s Blog

WSO2 announced the release of the Web Services Framework for C++ (WSF/C++) version 2.0.0. Similar to WSF/PHP which is really popular among the PHP community, WSF/CPP is the C++ language binding for the Apache Axis2/C and the other supporting web services projects like Apache Sandesha/C, Apache Rampart/C.

With this release C++ developers will be able to write web services and web service clients to inter-op with .NET/Java/PHP or any other platform built-on web service standards. The release is shiped with a code generation tool that will be used to generate the code for skeletons and stubs from a WSDL, so developers only need to concentrate on their business logic as the generated code will take care of building or parsing xmls and running them on top of the framework.
Here are the key features of the new release.

1. Support core web service standards like SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2, WSDL 1.1, WSDL 2.0, REST
2. Support for web services QoS specifications.
   • WS-Addressing
   • WS-Security
   • WS-Policy
   • WS-Security-Policy
   • WS-Reliable-Messaging
3. Support binary attachment with MTOM and SWA (With the Support for large binaries)
4. Code generation tool.
5. Proven interoperability with .NET.

As a side note, you will be able to participate to a free summer school training session on the WSF/CPP conducted by Nandika Jayawardane who is the project lead of both WSF/CPP and WSF/PHP on 30th July. You can register to it (for free) from here.

WSO2 Governance Registry (G-Reg) (Formally known as WSO2 Registry) is released its 3.0.0 version along with two other sibling WSO2 products, WSAS 3.1.0 and ESB 2.1.0. This is a major release specially for WSO2 Governance Registry as it contain number of new features and improvements.

1. The New Name – s/Registry/Governance Registry

The product name itself changed from ‘Registry’ to ‘Governance Registry’ (abbreviated as ‘G-Reg’). As it may hint you, now the product is more focused on the ‘Governance’ aspects than just the ‘registry’ or a ‘repository’ aspects. In early releases, it mainly used to store, retrieve configurations and persistence data that the other products would need. Now you can govern these resources (Services, Policies, Processes, People) inside the G-Reg itself. It has emerged to become a complete tool that help you in governing your SOA platform.

2. Separate Views for Add/View/Remove Services

In G-Reg ‘Services’ along with Service MetaData (policies, wsdls, schemas) are distinguished from other resources, as they are the key resources in a SOA platform. You will be able to add/list/view services directly from the main menu in the G-Reg UI.

Add Service Metadata

When adding a service you will be prompted to provide additional details on the services. As they will help users in discovering these services. The fields of these details are configurable as you will change them according to the policies and requirements of your organizations, but the defaults will be adequate for most of the scenarios.  Additionally G-Reg will do WS-I validation as you add WSDLs, Schemas.
Note that this is an additional view you will get as you can still discover services on a tree view arranged according to their namespaces using the registry browser as in previous releases.

3. Service Life cycle Management with Check-lists

Managing service lifecycle is a core part of governing services. G-Reg provides you this functionality with a simple user interface.

Lifecycle states can be promoted or demoted. The state transition can be ‘Designing’ -> ‘Developing’ -> ‘Testing’ -> ‘Deployed’. You can enforce a validation of a checklist in promoting the state to the next level. This states and the associated check-list items are highly configurable as you will change them to suit to the process of your organizations as you wish.

And G-Reg is shipped with a sample that extend the lifecycle management functionality by making it distributed. In there as you promote or demote the state, the service resource will move its position. The user guide on ‘Distributed Life Cycle Management Sample’ will describe how to use this functionality in more details. This will be really useful if you are enforcing a structured permission model in managing lifecycles. For an example you can enforce only developer role will be able to modify, check or promote a service in the ‘Developing’ state and QA role has permission in promoting a service in ‘Testing’ state and so on.

4. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

This is a brand new feature provide in G-Reg. You may find the user guide on ‘BAM’ will be really helpful in configuring the servers you want to monitor. But in order to view the monitoring data you have to go to the dashboard, which is the next new feature.

5. Dashboard

For most of the you, this will be the coolest feature in the new G-Reg., an eye-catching dashboard filled with bunch of Gadgets.

Dashboard

The dashboard provides you the information related to runtime governance as well as design-time governance as described in the ‘Dashboard’ user guide.

6. Eventing and Notifications

If you want you to notified when a resource is updated or a lifecycle state of a service is changed, this feature will be really helpful. Look at the ‘Eventing and Notifications’ user guide on how you can get notified and the built-in events that you can listen.

7. Mount Remote Resources – Federating Registries

If you are maintaining two separate registry instances, this feature will enable you to share resources among them. In G-Reg you can create links to resources in remote registries (remote-links) as well as to the resources in the same registry (sym-links). Here is the user guide for ‘Sym Links and Remote Links’ to read more details of the subject.

8. User Profiles
The new G-Reg has the ability to keep multiple user profiles per user. A simple how to on creating profiles can be found in the user guide on ‘User Profiles’.

9. Checkin/Checkout with Local Filesystem

The new G-Reg is shipped with a command line tool that allows you to checkin and checkout registry resources with your local filesystem. If you are familiar with a version control system like subversion, the checkin/checkout commands will not be much difficult to you.

Checking out a resource is simple as (the following command is what you typed in linux, in windows you will use the checkin-client.bat instead).

./checkin-client.sh co / -u user -p user_pw

And to checkin,

./checkin-client.sh ci -u user -p user_pw

Similarly you can use this tool to create backups or move resource or resource hierarchy off-line. Here is a complete user guide on ‘Checkin-Client’.

10. Performance Boost

Last but not least, the new G-Reg is performing very fast than its predecessor. In the performance test, it was seen each primitive operation in the registry is at least 10% faster in this release, where as some operations are performing much faster (for an example, ‘Add Collection’ operation seemed 50% faster). And the remote registry calls also optimized by keeping a local cache (http-level-caching).

This was a list of most notable new features in addition to the bunch of the features that was already there in the previous releases. You will be able to download WSO2 Governance Registry freely from the product website, http://wso2.org/projects/governance-registry and evaulate these features as you want.

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:)!!!

Are you curious What SOA is? Or How SOA revolutionize Enterprise technologies in recent times? Here is a great opportunity to you.

WSO2 is hosting a SOA Summer School for Free, starting from 18th June. It will enlighten you on different aspects of SOA like SOA in Enterprise, Scalable SOA, SOA with Security, SOA Governance, SOA in ESBS, BPMs and many more.

For more details visit the official page for the WSO2 SOA Summer School in here, http://wso2.org/training.

WSO2 announced the release of the revolutionary series of products introducing a componentized design to implement SOA in cost effective and simple manner.

1. WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS) – WSO2 WSAS is an enterprise ready web services engine based on Apache Axis2. It is incorporated with many features including,
   • 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
2. 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
3. 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
4. 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.

WSO2 is preparing for the first major release of their enterprise java product series after adapting the OSGI technology. You can already try out the betas from the wso2.org site.

1. WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS)
   
2. WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
3. WSO2 Registry
4. WSO2 Business Process Server (BPS)

With the power of OSGI you will be able to customize these products for your need just by mixing and matching the components within these products. If you like to learn more about this, just have a loot at the following ebook released by WSO2.

Making Good SOA Great

WSO2 has released an ebook “Making Good SOA Great – The WSO2 Story of Componentization” explaining how componentizations of middleware will improve the adaption of SOA in an enterprise IT system. And it introduces how you implement it in real systems using WSO2 carbon, the introducing WSO2 product of componentized SOA middleware.

You can see the presentation introducing WSO2 carbon from here,
Introduction to WSO2 Carbon – Componentized SOA Platform.

“WSO2 carbon is a componentized, customizable SOA Platform, You can adapt the middleware to your enterprise architecture, rather than adapt your architecture to the middleware”.

Few weeks back, I did a screencast on how to consume a web service using WSF/PHP demonstrating an application of US National Digital Weather Forecast Database. In that webservice there are operations like “GmlLatLonList” that retrieve a KML for a given longitude and latitude inside USA. I wrote a simple mashup that load this KML from the web service and set it as a layer in a map which is created using openlayers.

There I use the WSO2 Mashup Server to create the stub to invoke the weather forecasting web service. This stub can be easily used to invoke the service from a javascript in a HTML page.

You can visit the mashup from the Mashup Server community site mooshup.com from here, http://mooshup.com/services/Dimuthu/weatherMap/.

Here are the steps I used to create this mashup.

1. First I wrote a javascript to wrap the web service. It has a function that can be used as a stub to invoke the web service operation just as a javascript function call. Here is the source of the javascript I wrote. It wraps the “GmlLatLonList” service operation in the “fetchWeatherInfo” function. I gave this javascript service the name “weatherMap”.

   this.serviceName = "weatherMap";
   this.scope = "application";
   this.documentation = "Visit the weather information from just a mouse click";
   
   fetchWeatherInfo.documentation = "Retrieve the weather information for the given inputs" ;
   fetchWeatherInfo.inputTypes = {"listLatLon" : "string",
                                  "startTime" : "string",
                                  "endTime" : "string"};
   fetchWeatherInfo.outputType = "xml";
   function fetchWeatherInfo(listLatLon, startTime, endTime){
   
       var url = "http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/SOAP_server/ndfdXMLserver.php";
   
       // setting up the the WSRequest
       var request = new WSRequest();
   
       var options = new Array();
       options.useSOAP = 1.1;
       options.useWSA = false;
   
       // do the request
       request.open(options, url, false);
   
       var reqXml =
           <ns:GmlTimeSeries xmlns:ns="uri:DWMLgen">
               <listLatLon>{listLatLon}</listLatLon>
               <startTime>{startTime}</startTime>
               <endTime>{endTime}</endTime>
               <compType>Between</compType>
               <featureType>Ndfd_KmlPoint</featureType>
               <propertyName></propertyName>
           </ns:GmlTimeSeries>
   
       request.send(reqXml);
   
       return request.responseXML;
   }

2. Deployed it in the WSO2 Mashup server. I downloaded and setup the mashup server locally. Then I just needed to put the script inside “scripts/dimuthu” directory. There is an online instance of mashup server called mooshup.com in which I later deployed my service. After deployed it in the mashup, it will generate the javascript stub for that service. You can view the generated stub by adding a “?stub” to the mashup url. Here is the stub for the “weatherMap” mashup deployed in the mooshup server, http://mooshup.com/services/Dimuthu/weatherMap?stub. Similarly you can view the try out page for the service from, http://mooshup.com/services/Dimuthu/weatherMap?tryit
3. Wrote an HTML interface for the service. I used the openlayers javascript library to load google map in to my page. And added a custom control that handles the click. In the click handler, I just call the stub and get the response KML string back using a code similar to this.

   <!-- include the script for the stub -->
   <script type="text/javascript" src="../weatherMap?stub"></script>
   
   <script language="javascript">
   ...
   
   // the code inside the handler of the click control
   
      // preparing the stub call
      weatherMap.fetchWeatherInfo.onError = handleError;
      weatherMap.fetchWeatherInfo.callback = function(response) {
          if(response && response.firstChild.firstChild.nodeValue) {
   
              // handling kml document
              var kmlDoc = response.firstChild.firstChild.nodeValue;
   
              // the code to add the kml layer to the map and render it
              ....
            }
       };
      // preparing the startTime, endTIme, lat, lon values
      ...
   
      // doing the request call
      weatherMap.fetchWeatherInfo(lat + "," + lon, startTime, endTime);
   
   </script>

   The KML style icon will be shown in the map after adding the KML layer to the map. And we can render the KML style details which in this case contain the weather forecast data in detail in some other place easily.

So this way you can create a mashup using openlayers and the data retrieved from different web services. You can find another mashup that shows the twitter updates on a map in real time at here, http://mooshup.com/services/tyrell/TwitterMap/.

WSO2 Carbon is getting ready to come out very soon. You want to know what exactly WSO2 Carbon is?. Just check this samisa’s blog about “Carbon In Pictures”.