Paul, an award-winning CTO, gets asked why he is driven to build out the future roadmap when WSO2 is already two years ahead of the competition. Three big factors are the broad IT industry dynamics that are demanding new approaches to middleware, insights gained from WSO2’s own development teams and products, and inspiration from innovative customer implementations. In his keynote presentation at WSO2Con 2011, Paul outlined WSO2’s near-term roadmap as well as longer term projects. Here are some of the priorities he identified for 2012 and beyond. About the Speaker Co-founder and CTO, Paul spearheads WSO2’s overall product strategy. His involvement in Open Source goes back to the original Apache SOAP project, where Paul donated code to enable access to Enterprise JavaBeans. He was a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM for 9 years and led IBM’s involvement in the Axis C/C++ project. He currently co-chair’s the OASIS Web Services Reliable eXchange Technical Committee, which is charged with creating the industry standard for reliable message exchange over SOAP. Date: Wed, 12th Oct, 2011 Level: Introductory Reads: 1332 Comments: 0 | Login or register to post comments

Big Data

Driving the demand for big data are increasing complexity and the search for greater detail. For example, one WSO2 financial customer used to analyze 200 million trades per day, Paul noted. Now that customer wants to see what happened to the 8 billion transactions that led up to those trades.

Apache Cassandra is one model that WSO2 has begun adopting to manage big data, taking advantage of its dynamic, high scalability and NoSQL model. Others under consideration at WSO2 are Infinispan for putting big data in cache memory, Hadoop for processing big data, and the Apache HDFS dynamic and highly scalable file system model. Work with both Hadoop and HDFS are currently in progress.

Changing Price Points for Mobile Apps Slides 24-28

The proliferation of mobile devices and lower costs will change the dynamics of mobile applications. According to a Frost & Sullivan forecast, there will be more than 550 million smart phones in use worldwide.

Lower-cost devices will help to accelerate adoption, Paul noted, and he cited three examples. One is an $80 Android smart phone that is letting some half million people in Africa get on the Internet. Another is the $25 Raspberry Pie computer developed by a team from Cambridge University Research, which is powerful enough to stream live video. Third is the Arduino ADK, which makes it possible to take an Android smart phone, and for example put it into a remote rice field to monitor the depth of water—requiring only a 3G connection and sunlight.

As a result, mobile applications will need to cost less, and they will need to connect to server-side systems in order to be useful. One example, Paul shared, is a mobile application that WSO2 has built with Cannapi. The survey application, which was built from a single DSL file, collects survey data and then connects to cloud services running on the WSO2 Stratos cloud middleware platform.

Cloud and the Ecosystem PaaS

Gartner has presented a PaaS reference model at its recent conferences. Today, WSO2 provides software for each section of the model, Paul said. He added, “We’ve gained a big appreciation for the cloud, which view in two dimensions.” One is how to enable a platform in the cloud with multi-tenancy and elasticity; the other is building the right programming model for the cloud, which incorporates shared nothing. An interesting facet for Paul was that both Apache Axis2 and Apache Synapse have a shared nothing, asynchronous model internally noting, “It was something we didn’t appreciate at the time.”

Moving forward, a key area of focus is the ecosystem PaaS. In this scenario, Paul explained, an enterprise provides a PaaS on top of which partners can add their own SaaS applications. Partners take the advantage of the ecosystem while the enterprise can cost effectively bring more value to customers.

WSO2 already is working with three companies in the telecom and gaming industries on their ecosystem PaaS implementations. WSO2 is an ideal solution provider for these enterprises, since the WSO2 Stratos cloud middleware platform is fully open source, is based on open standards, and is available both as a software product and as a hosted service (StratosLive), Paul said. He envisions that as the ecosystem PaaS evolves, more social factors will feed into it.

End-to-End Development Lifecycle

Creating an end-to-end development lifecycle is another priority for WSO2, Paul said. Currently, WSO2 provides a deployment synchronizer with SVN and offers SVN-as-a-service. It also is working on integrating Github and SVN with both WSO2 Stratos and WSO2 StratosLive.

In the near-term, WSO2 plans to enhance integration and synchronization between SVN and registry. Looking out further, WSO2 plans full lifecycle development in Stratos through SVN, FindBugs, Selenium and Jenkins.

Paul noted that in 2012, “I would love to use the iPad to edit code online, hit submit to run the code in Stratos, test it, and then say, ‘Right, put it into production’.”

To learn more about WSO2’s vision and recent technical developments, as well as both near-term and longer-term roadmaps, view Paul’s complete keynote here.