Hiranya

You have heard about it! You have read about it! You may even have dreamt about it! The WSO2 Mashup Server is a platform for creating, deploying, and consuming Web services Mashups in the simplest fashion possible. And when I say simple I mean like a piece of cake. In fact you don't have to know a damn thing about Web services to get started with the WSO2 Mashup Server. Some basic knowledge on JavaScript is all you need. Now how cool is that?

Day by day Web Services are making the Web more dynamic, interactive and fun. Thanks to Web Services the World Wide Web which used to be a pile of content for reading and browsing has turned into the most dynamic and active source of information in the world. At the same time it has become a play field for those who love to play, a huge world wide dating service for those who wanna flirt, a medium for expressing viewpoints for those who want their opinion to be heard by others (I personally know a guy who used his blog to announce that he has started an affair with a girl) and a primary means of interactive communication for everybody in general.

Pentaho For Dummies

In a previous blog entry I discussed a fair amount on business intelligence and other related concepts. So today I thought discussing about a specific business intelligence system would be worth while. I have been playing with the Pentaho business intelligence platform for the last couple of weeks for a project. The Pentaho BI project is an ongoing effort by the open source community to develop a feature rich business intelligence system which is also capable of enterprise reporting, data analysis, dash boarding, data mining and workflow management. This seems little too much for a business intelligence system and that's probably why we should refer to it as a business intelligence platform and not as just a simple BI system. To make a long story short, it supports all kinds of BI related tasks and is the number 1 ranked open source BI system.

Out of the Maze...

Many authors seem to associate the term 'Service Oriented Architecture' or simply 'SOA' with Web services. It is a very common mistake among the newbies in the world of Web services to believe that SOA and Web services essentially refer to the same thing when they actually don't. Technically speaking SOA is a concept at a bit higher level than Web services. SOA is an architectural approach to achieve loose coupling between software agents while enabling software reusability. A service is a unit of work performed by a service provider to facilitate the operation of a service consumer. Both the service provider (server) and the consumer (client) are software agents most probably residing in two distinct machines. Even though the consumer utilizes the services offered by the service provider it is not tightly bound to the service provider. If the services provided by the server are not satisfactory the service consumer has the freedom to switch to a different service provider and this switching does not require any changes to the service client.

A new paradigm…

Information technology is probably not the only science that has gone through some drastic improvements during the last couple of decades. Many other sciences have lifted themselves from the ground level to a much higher level where humans now find it difficult to live without them. Some new sciences have popped up from nowhere and have managed to entirely change the way humans used to look at the nature and the universe at the beginning of the last century. Some sciences have combined together to create so powerful technologies giving rise to a variety of new application domains.

Story Time...

Once a student counselor was addressing a gathering of students. He held up a very large and heavy book and asked the students "what will happen if I continue to hold this book in this fashion for another five minutes?". "Your hand might begin to ache, but nothing serious", replied the students. "OK, then what will happen if I hold it for five long hours amidst all difficulties and pain?", counselor asked. "You will feel a terrible pain", one student  replied. "Your hand will go numb and you won't be able to recover from it for a long time" another student said. Similarly different students came up with different answers. Having patiently listened to all the opinions from the students the counselor said "Right...Actually all of them are possibilities...". Then he said "my next question is during the five hours what is the parameter that changed which caused me so much pain and agony? What makes holding the book for five minutes different from holding the book for five hours?". Students were absolutely silent. Then counselor gave the answer himself. "Well my dear students, if you look at the case closely you will see that actually nothing has changed during the five hours. The weight of the book has remained constant all the time. It is my bad attitude to hold the book so hardly for a very long time that would give me the pain. Similarly in life sometimes you need to take a break from your work and do something else, something refreshing. Trying to hold on to something so hardly will make your life a lot difficult and painful."

“Time for minor skirmishes is over!!! Now we do battle!!!”

Don’t get alarmed by reading the above. I’m still blogging about Web services and related technologies (not about ancient war craft). I just wanted to say that having discussed a lot of theoretical stuff in the previous blog entries (or rather going around and around the bush) now I’m fully armed and ready to start developing and deploying Web services of my own. There are loads of tested and proven methods, tools and IDEs to help Web services developers. So to start with I’m going to stick to a very simple and straight forward method which involves Apache Axis2 (well actually I will be using WSO2 WSAS, which is powered by Axis2), Eclipse IDE and Axis2 Eclipse plugins. It is pretty much a very painless and known-to-work kind of method and ideal for budding Web services developers (and even for pros of the industry). Let this blog entry be a tutorial to those out there who have just stepped into the world of Web services and willing to experiment with the technology (and may the best developer win :-)).

Conspiracy Revealed!!!

So far in this blog I have been discussing about fundamental principles, protocols and languages involved in Web services. So now it's high time we focus a bit on the practical aspects of Web services, with the support of the framework we have built so far from the theoretical stuff I have discussed in my previous blog entries. If you can recall the 'Ultra-Mobile' example I have mentioned in my immediate past blog entry, I have discussed things like how to publish Web services, how clients can properly identify an invoke a Web service and how clients can find out about existing Web services. But if you look closely you will notice that I have neatly skipped a fundamental aspect regarding Web services there. I have said that 'Ultra-Mobile' has got a Web service up and running but I haven't mentioned how they have made it up and running. (“oh yeah..I'm good..Am I not?”) Well actually that was done intentionally because otherwise that blog entry would have been way too complicated and long. (“one step at a time...just applying the divide and conquer algorithm, you know”)