[wsas-java-dev] [ANN] WSO2 WSAS 2.0-beta released

[Afkham Azeez]

The WSO2 WSAS team is pleased to announce the release of the WSO2 WSAS
2.0-beta

This release can be downloaded from http://wso2.org/projects/wsas/java


WSO2 WSAS 2.0 - Release Note - 16th July 2007
======================================================================
WSO2 WSAS is an integrated Web services Platform which offers a complete
middleware solution.  It is a lightweight, high performing platform for
Service Oriented Architectures, enabling business logic and
applications. Bringing together a number of Apache Web services
projects, WSO2 WSAS provides a secure, transactional and reliable
runtime for deploying and managing Web services.

What is new in WSAS 2.0-beta
----------------------------

* Data services support
	Allows data in relational databases to be exposed as Web services, and
to be included in	Web mashups with ease.	
	
* Eclipse IDE integration
	Wizard based flows to automate most steps and make easy the process of
developing, deploying and debugging Web services.
	
* Clustering support
	Clustering support with state replication for high availability, along
with load balancing,	failover and cluster-wide management functions.

* Full support for WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-Policy and
WS-SecureConversation and XKMS. Extended security with support for
WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-Policy and WS-SecureConversation with
additional means for secure Web-based communications using public key
infrastructure (PKI) with XKMS. This release of WSO2 WSAS also includes
an inbuilt SecurityTokenService as defined in WS-Trust specification.	

* EJB service provider support
	Expose EJBs deployed on a remote J2EE application server (AS) as Web
services. 	

* Axis1 backward compatibility
	Easily deploy any Apache Axis1-based Web service and engage advanced
WS-* services, such as WS-RM and WS-Policy in front of legacy Axis1
services.

- --------------------------
Features List
==========================
* Hosting of mashup services written using JavaScript with E4X XML extension
     - Simple file based deployment model
* JavaScript annotations to configure the deployed services
* Auto generation of many resources for the deployed mashups
     - JavaScript stubs that can be used to access the mashup service by
clients
     - TryIt functionality to try out the mashup service
     - WSDL1/WSDL2/XSD documents to describe the mashup service
     - API documentation
     many more...

* Ability to bundle a custom user interface for the mashups
* Many useful JavaScript Hostobjects that can be used when writing mashups
     - WSRequest : invoke services from the mashup services
     - File : File storage/manipulation functionality.
     - System : Set of system specific utility functions.
     - Session : Ability to share objects across different service
invocations.
     - Scraper (Experimental) : Extract data from HTML pages and present
in XML format.
     - APPClient (Experimental) : Atom Publishing Protocol client to
       retrieve/publish Atom feeds with APP servers

* Mashup Server Management console to easily manage the mashups
* Ability to share the deployed mashups with other WSO2 Mashup servers
* Mashup sharing community portal (mashups.wso2.org) to share and host your
   mashups - going live in the second week of July 2007

- -------------------------
Known Issues
------------

1. POJO to Web service feature is still at an experimental stage.
One can upload jar/zip file and can create an AAR out of it.
If you uploaded a jar/zip file which has a services.xml file in its
META-INF directory, when its transformed into AAR its services.xml
will be replaced by the generated services.xml. In addition to this,
the user cannot associate any library dependencies or web content with
the generated AAR file.

Due to limitations in Axis2, method overloading is not supported, and
hence the WSDL for services where methods are overloaded cannot be
generated.
Hence all WSDL based functionality related to services will not work for
such services.

2. WS-Policy support is still in experimental stage and limited to single
port scenarios.

3. You cannot have two different versions of the Apache Sandesha2 module
in the system.

4. A <parameter name="OmitSOAP12Action">true</parameter> entry has been
added to the HTTP & HTTPS transportSenders in order to overcome some
issues with some browsers. In case of interoperability failures, please
change the value of this parameter to false and retry.

- ------------------------
Reporting Problems
========================

Issues can be reported using the public JIRA available at
https://wso2.org/jira/browse/WSAS


- ------------------------
Contact us
========================

WSO2 WSAS developers can be contacted via mailing lists:
For Users : wsas-java-user at wso2.org
For Developers : wsas-java-dev at wso2.org
For details on subscriptions see http://www.wso2.org/projects/wsas/java#mail

Alternatively, questions can also be raised in the forums:
For Users :  http://www.wso2.org/forum/181
For Developers : http://www.wso2.org/forum/184


Thanks for your interest in WSO2 WSAS,
-- WSO2 WSAS Team