Newsletter

This past month we launched SOA Summer School, and thousands of members of our community have joined in. But that's not the only thing keeping us busy - we've also been hard at work on the next generation of our OSGi-based product lineup. The componentized Carbon architecture has matured, along with OSGi domain knowledge, and we are ready to ship a matured stable set of products to the community. Apart from being a much more stable release, the new-and-improved Carbon framework also carries additional features including the Rules support in ESB, Governance support in the Registry, a transactional JMS transport and many more improvements. This generation is in the Release Candidate (RC) phase now and will become GA very soon.

On that note, it is interesting to note how WSO2 defines the release life cycle:

• Milestone releases - Each and every milestone will add a set of new features, but we try our best to limit the new features in a given milestone to a absolute minimum (like only one) to make it easier to find what new features cause any potential regressions, if there are any.
• Alpha release - All features are complete, but there is no guarantee on stability.
• Beta releases - All Level 1 issues are fixed and the release is guaranteed to be stable from the development perspective.
• Release Candidates - All Level 1 and Level 2 issues are fixed and the release is ready for development purposes.
• General Availability - Ready for production environments.

Stay tuned to WSO2 OxygenTank to see these product releases getting off the ground. Until then, we welcome you to try out the RC versions and provide your feedback to our development team!

Hello WSO2 community!  This month we are launching a program that is very special to me, and I wanted to personally share the news with you.  As you know, the IT community has been affected in a lot of ways by the global economic crisis that hit last fall.  For Open Source in general, there is a silver lining: we are seeing more enterprise adoption than ever, since almost every company is looking to cut costs.  But unfortunately, many experienced, hard-working IT architects and developers have been laid off.  Long term, experts say that IT jobs will be in high demand, but I know there are still a lot of good people looking for work right now.  During tough times like these, the IT community pulls together to help one another.

That's why WSO2 is launching the new SOA Summer School.  We're creating 8 new training courses, and giving them away - completely free of charge.  The material is meant to help you become familiar with SOA-related issues and best practices, as a way of improving your marketability, whether you are employed or looking for work.  These customized 2-3 hour weekly training sessions will be held every Thursday for 8 weeks, starting June 18.  They'll be taught by our most senior technical experts, who have a lot of experience with different SOA use case deployments.  It's important to note that these courses are NOT just about WSO2 products, but rather give an industry overview of topics like SOA reference architectures, governance, scalability, and much more. When we give examples, of course we will use WSO2 open source code, but the concepts are applicable to any technology.  For all the details like course descriptions and registration information, visit our SOA Summer School page.

We've heard great feedback from users on benefits and flexibility gained out of the Carbon framework we released a little over 4 months ago.
The question that's been asked in forums many time over is whether mashup capabilities too will be available in the Carbon framework. So the good news is that as we speak, work is being carried out to get the Mashup Server functionality on to the Carbon platform. In fact, we hope to have it completed as early as end June!

By moving in to the Carbon platform, we are extending mashup capabilities of service composition on to the Carbon platform. You could find bits more of that in the podcast we recently published on the OxygenTank.

As the only open source mashup server available today, the WSO2 Mashup server enables users mashup data from many data sources such as Web pages, RSS feeds, blogs and databases. We've also recently published a 4-minute Flash presentation that explains Mashup Server functionality to newbies.

The WSO2 ESB has been getting a lot of press since version 2.0 was released, especially because it's now built on the WSO2 Carbon platform (meaning ESB functionality is now offered as components - enabled by OSGi). But there's much more to the WSO2 ESB than this modularity. Personally, I've been involved with building out the eventing support, so that the WSO2 ESB now supports WS-Eventing (Aug 2004) specification. What's so great about this eventing spec? WS-Eventing is what enables EDA (Event Driven Architecture) capabilities, which further enhances the loosely-coupled nature of SOAs.

To help explain this concept and how the WSO2 technology supports it, we've published 2 articles on the WSO2 OxygenTank library. The first one, titled 'Fusion: Eventing with SOA - Introduction', is a comprehensive introduction to WS-Eventing. The second, 'Fusion: Eventing with SOA Part 2 - Eventing with Synapse and WSO2 ESB', describes functional and technical details on implementing eventing in the WSO2 ESB.

In January, we rolled out the the first ever componentized SOA framework WSO2 Carbon. Carbon-based Web Services Application Server, Enterprise Service Bus and Registry together with the WSO2 Business Process Server - our first ever BPEL engine were shipped. Our open source Business Process Server product allows developers easily deploy business processes written using the WS-BPEL standard.

BPEL or BPEL4WS is a language used for the definition and execution of business processes using Web services. BPEL enables us compose business processes using Web services through orchestration and composition. Built on the foundation of Web services, the standard supports SOAP, WSDL, WS-Coordination, WS-Transaction WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Coordination, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Security and WS-Trust.

Last month we shared a sneak peek of the WSO2 Carbon framework, a new technology based on OSGi that will allow WSO2 products to be fully componentized. This month, we are rolling out WSO2 ESB 2.0, which will provide a better management console, increased performance, and will ship with the new WSO2 Carbon framework for maximum extensibility.

Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP), and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) are heavily used terms in the integration of the enterprise, and WSO2 supports almost all of the integration patterns defined in the EIP book of Gregor Hohpe & Bobby Woolf. It also supports the Event Driven Architecture (EDA) in integration through eventing, and the WSO2 ESB can act as a reliable event broker.

Clustering for high availability and scalability is one of the main requirements of any enterprise deployment. This is also true for WSO2's open source SOA middleware products. Managing a cluster can also be cumbersome and tricky.

WSO2 Carbon is the name of the base framework and the architecture of the newer generation of WSO2's Open Source SOA middleware products. It has extensive support for clustering, which it inherits the clustering capabilities which it inherits from Apache Axis2.

WSO2 Carbon provides both cluster management and state replication. The cluster management component provides an easy to use interface for managing a cluster.You could connect to the different member backends of different groups from the cluster management UI and individually manage those members.

The WSO2 ESB can also act as a membership-aware dynamic load balancer. This load balancer itself can be deployed in its own group, which addresses the concern of single point of failure for the load balancer. The figure below shows a possible deployment architecture with cluster management. We also have several new resources available to explain other features and benefits of Carbon, including an architectural overview slide presentation and a downloadable ebook, on the Carbon project page.

WSO2 products perform core functions required within SOAs: service creation, connection, composition and governance. Today, these functionalities, while comprehensive, are limited to certain individual products. For example, you could use WSAS to provide and consume services, and the ESB for message mediation. However, if you want to do both service hosting and message mediation, you have to seprately download and install these individual products.

Offering a full-featured suite of SOA products is great for our customers, but we want to maximize the benefits of SOA by providing even more flexibility. WSO2 has launched a project, code named Carbon, to unify the SOA solutions platform.