Quick Product Overview

Hi Paul, Have you seen the Create, Connect, Compose, Govern theme on the wso2.com site? Here is how the products can be categorized according to that, This is a very high level view of each product. Depending on your use case you may decide to mix n match each of these. Create WSO2 WSAS - Is a complete runtime for enterprise grade web services. Offers WS-Security, WS-RM, WS-Addressing and many other features such as Caching, Throttling. Data Services - Geared towards exposing data locked up in various data sources (Databases, CSV files or Excel file) as service with WS-Security, WS-RM, WS-Addressing and many other features such as Caching, Throttling. Web Services Frameworks - Helps users build/consume web services with ease in the language of there choice. API's are designed so that they are easy to use in these languages. Connect WSO2 ESB - Helps connect and manage various parts of your SOA. It can also Manage and transform service interactions between Web services, REST/POX services and legacy systems Compose WSO2 Mashup Server - Compose services with JavaScript with the E4X extension. It can Consume data from various sources such as feeds, HTML pages, external Web services, databases, Excel files etc with ease Governance WSO2 Registry - Could act as a RESTfull registry for artifacts and include social meta-data such as rating, tagging and comments. We are building more SOA governance features into the registry. WSO2 Identity Solution - Enable CardSpace and OpenID authentication for web applications Thanks, Keith. Blog : http://www.keith-chapman.org/

Hi Paul, Adding to what Keith mentioned here are some reference pages for you to visit: You will find product specific features listed on the project home pages, eg: http://wso2.org/projects/wsas/java for WSO2 WSAS. The landing page to the complete list of project home pages on wso2.org is at http://wso2.org/projects If you want an overview of how most of these products work together to create the middleware platform for SOA, performing specific functionality, then you should visit the wso2.com site: http://wso2.com/products/create http://wso2.com/products/connect http://wso2.com/products/compose http://wso2.com/products/govern Hope this will be helpful -Chatra Nakkawita

To your specific questions though: 1) The WSO2 Web Services Application Server is primarily a host for Java-based services. WSO2 Data Services is a host for services exposing data sources of various kinds, described by a simple configuration language which can be written in XML or using a simple wizard-style user interface. Thus the former is primarily des Digned to appeal to Java programmers, the latter to data base administrators. Much of the infrastructure is shared between the products, and WSAS also can host data services alongside the Java services. WSO2 Data Services thus can also be seen as a WSAS stripped down for data base administrator-type users. 2) Apache Axis2/Java essentially serves as the Web Services Framework for Java, without the need to adapt the programming model to the specifics of another language. You might think of WSAS as an enterprise-ready version of Axis2/Java, serving the purpose you would expect from a Web Services Framework for Java. We provide support services for plain Axis2 as well as for WSAS and our other products. Hope that helps!

Thanks to all for you replies. Jonathan you really hit the nail on the head for me. Regards Paul