Most of the large enterprise systems consists of many software systems. These different systems provide various functionalities required by the whole system. Therefore in order to provide some features across the platform these smaller software modules has to communicate with each other. However different software modules use different technologies and provide various protocols to communicate with the external systems. Standard transports like HTTP, SMTP, JMS, FTP, FIX and various adapter types such as SAP are widely being used. These transports can use different message formats such as SOAP, POX messages and different text message formats. Hence integrating these systems efficient and manageable manner in a distributed system is a well known problem.

Enterprise service bus (ESB) is a commonly used solution for this problem. ESB provides the communication path between heterogeneous systems by providing support for different transports, and message format conversion is done by using a canonical form such as XML. This intermediate canonical form can be used to process the message at the ESB as well.

WSO2 Business Process Server (BPS) is packaged with WSO2 Message Broker (MB), which implements Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). Therefore, any JMS client or an AMQP client can directly talk to the WSO2 BPS. This article describes how to configure WSO2 BPS as a JMS sever and as a JMS client to talk to external services with Active MQ and Apache Qpid.

Load Balancer is a crucial component in scalable architectures. WSO2 Load Balancer not only balances the load across the application instances, but also scales the system automatically to cater the dynamically changing load. WSO2 Load Balancer is a WSO2 Carbon based product. In this post, we will look how autoscaling works with the Load Balancer.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications running on-premise today may need to run in the cloud tomorrow. There are many tools to assist in building on-premise SOA applications quickly and efficiently, but very few support the private and public cloud platforms onto which these applications are moving. In her presentation at WSO2Con 2011, Chathuri addressed the demand to develop applications once in a way that allows them to be deployed on-premise or in the cloud as needed. She also demonstrated best practices for doing so using the WSO2 Carbon Studio integrated development environment (IDE). Here are highlights from her talk.

Chathuri joined WSO2 in April 2009 as a Senior Software Engineer and is currently working on the WSO2 Tools team.

Increasingly IT professionals and business managers are taking advantage of business activity monitoring (BAM) to provide real-time visibility into the processes, transactions and workflows that are exposed as services within a service-oriented architecture (SOA). In his presentation at WSO2Con 2011, Tharindu explored the connection between BAM and SOA. He also provided a framework for customizing and monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) using the revamped WSO2 BAM as an example. Here are highlights from his talk.

Tharindu joined WSO2 in May 2009 and is a Senior Software Engineer and Product Manager of the WSO2 Business Activity Monitor team. He founded WSO2 WSF/Spring during his intership for WSO2 in 2008. He also contributed to implementing Hessian Support for the WSO2 ESB. He took part in Google Summer of Code for 2008 for the open source JDK implementation Apache Harmony.

The recent security breaches of major corporations and government agencies once again highlight the importance of implementing an effective security model within an SOA deployment to protect company data, employees, partners and customers. Going beyond authentication, authorization and auditing, security in practice relies heavily on battle-tested security patterns to combat thousands of cyber criminals worldwide seeking to exploit the any security hole in the system. In his WSO2Con 2011 session, Prabath discussed the patterns, best practices and threats associated with SOA security models. He also explored how standards, such as WS-Security, SAML, XACML, WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation and WS-SecurityPolicy have come to define the ‘best-fit’ security model to an SOA deployment based on Web services. Additionally, he looked at how OpenID, OAuth, and Simple Cloud Identity Management (SCIM) have evolved to provide a ‘best-fit’ security model for Internet identity management. Here are highlights from his talk.

Prabath joined WSO2 in November 2007 and is currently a Software Architect and Senior Manager. He is an Apache Axis2 PMC member and has more than 7 years industry experience. Prior to joining WSO2, Prabath worked at Virtusa (NASDAQ: VRTU) for 3+ years. He has presented at numerous conferences including OSCON, ApacheCon, Apache Asia Roadshow, WSO2Con 2010, and WSO2 SOA Workshops. He has been involved in developing the OASIS Identity Metasystem Interoperability Version 1.0 specification.

Enterprises look for governance solutions that can help manage their people, processes, and policies. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance brings the arsenal of tools and frameworks that help developers and administrators to more effectively and efficiently manage these aspects of the enterprise. In his WSO2Con 2011 session, Senaka discussed the key concepts of SOA governance, how to incorporate governance in the enterprise, and how the WSO2 Governance Registry can help manage application development, testing and deployment processes, as well as service lifecycles and assets. Here are highlights from his talk.

He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), and also a Project Management Committee (PMC) member and committer for a number of projects at the ASF. Senaka founded WSO2 WSF/C++ during his internship at WSO2 in 2008.

Increasingly, enterprises are turning to the cloud as a cost-effective way to extend the reach of their applications. However, Gartner forecasts that vendors will not have true, integrated and complete middleware platforms and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) frameworks until 2015. In his presentation at WSO2Con 2011, Azeez explored basic cloud middleware platform and PaaS principles, using WSO2 Stratos and WSO2 StratosLive as examples.

Azeez joined WSO2 in December 2005 and currently works in the capacity of Director, Architecture. He is an elected Member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and also a Project Management Committee (PMC) member and committer on a number of projects at ASF.

When you write a complex mashup with WSO2 Mashup Server which aggregate several external web services, you will definitely need to communicate with secured web services. It is very easy with WSO2 Mashup Server as it does this with service composition. In this article, we will discuss how WSO2 Mashup Server allows you to invoke services secured with advanced security scenarios.