Weeks have passed by since I did my last blog post. The reason for my prolonged silence in the blog sphere was due to the fact that I was working hard on a very important point release of WSO2 Carbon 2.0 and a host of WSO2 Java products based on the Carbon platform. Ideally these releases should have come out bit early but realizing the importance of implementing some new features, we decided to push the releases back by a few weeks. Anyway WSO2 Carbon 2.0 and four of the Carbon based WSO2 products (WSAS 3.1, ESB 2.1, G-Reg 3.0 and IS 2.0) were released on 8th July 2009 and you can now download them from the download page of the WSO2 Oxygen Tank.
WSO2 Carbon is an OSGi based application framework for SOA and Web Services. All WSO2 Java products including WSO2 ESB, WSO2 WSAS, WSO2 Governance Registry and WSO2 Identity Server are based on this revolutionary SOA platform. We have made some very important architectural and functional enhancements to WSO2 Carbon recently. Therefore the users of Carbon 2.0 based products will be able to reap the benefits of those improvements in the forms of improved performance, reliability, extensibility, user friendliness and stability.
One of the most important architectural changes we made to the Carbon platform this time around is getting rid of OSGi bundle activators and instead, adapting OSGi declarative services to handle bundle initialization and cleanup. OSGi declarative services are considered the best solution when it comes to managing systems with a large number of OSGi bundles. Declarative services allow bundles to startup and initialize properly while sharing required data among various bundles without following a pre configured bundle startup order. Declarative services also helped us improve the dynamic nature of the overall Carbon platform, so now starting bundles and stopping bundles at runtime is easier and safer.
Another key enhancement we did for this release of Carbon is the introduction of the P2 based provisioning system. This work is still at its early stages but it already enables Carbon and Carbon based product users to easily deploy Carbon components, user developed OSGi bundles, mediators and third party dependencies to the system easily, without having to write a single line of code to handle OSGi initialization or cleanup work.
In General Carbon 2.0 and Carbon 2.0 products have better registry integration support, better transport management support, better user management support, better security features and better user interfaces. We gave most of the Carbon component UIs a fresh look through the extended use of AJAX. Persistence of configuration data is another area where we have done a lot of work lately. WSO2 ESB 2.1 in particular has the ability to store the entire ESB configuration in a registry and then load the configuration back from the registry during server startup.
Documentation is yet another area that’s been largely improved with this release. We paid special attention to improving our context sensitive help documents (accessed via product user interfaces) and other downloadable guides and tutorials. In the previous releases of Carbon and Carbon based products we were mostly focused on system architecture and functionality. But now the Carbon framework is largely stabilized we were able to spare some cycles for improving our documentation too. We have added lots of new guides and catalogs including mediator catalog, transports catalog, server administration guide and the endpoints guide. Our plan is to make our products easy to learn and use via making our user interfaces simple, integrating help with the user interfaces and making ample documentation freely available to all.
In addition to the key improvements mentioned above Carbon 2.0 and related products come with tons of new features, minor bug fixes, performance enhancements and usability improvements which add lot of value to the WSO2 Carbon SOA platform. If you are interested in SOA and Web Services middleware you must give some of the new Carbon 2.0 based WSO2 products a try. After all it’s totally free and open source so it doesn’t cost you a penny to try our software. I guarantee that it would be a great experience and after that you will love WSO2 products.
On a finishing note I would like to quote the WSO2 Carbon 2.0 release note here….
WSO2 Carbon 2.0.0 - Middleware a' la carte
Welcome to the WSO2 Carbon 2.0.0 release. This release is available for download at http://wso2.org/projects/carbon
WSO2 Carbon is the base platform for all WSO2 Java products. Built on OSGi, Carbon encapsulates major SOA functionality such as data services, business process management, ESB routing/transformation, rules, security, throttling, caching, logging and monitoring. These product capabilities are no longer tied to individual products, but are available as components.
A Carbon feature consists of one or more Carbon components. These are nothing but Eclipse equinox P2 features. In order to extend the functionality of you Carbon server, simply install new features onto you server as outlined in https://wso2.org/wiki/display/carbon/p2-based-provisioning-support
Key Features
- Extensible OSGi component based architecture
- P2 provisioning based feature enhancement of the server
- Unified server management framework
- Unified Management Console
- Web service, JMX & Equinox OSGi console based administration
- Integrated security & permissions management
New Features In This Release
- Experimental Equinox P2 based provisioning support - extend your Carbon instance by installing new P2 features (See https://wso2.org/wiki/display/carbon/p2-based-provisioning-support)
- Fixed start levels eliminated
- Performance improvements to the Registry
- Ability to make normal jar files into OSGi bundle (Just copy the jar files into CARBON_HOME/repository/components/lib)
- Various bug fixes and enhancements including architectural improvements to Apache Axis2, Apache Rampart, Apache Sandesha2 , WSO2 Carbon and other projects, including security fixes
How to Run
- Extract the downloaded zip
- Go to the bin directory in the extracted folder
- Run the wso2server.sh or wso2server.bat as appropriate
- Point you browser to the URL https://localhost:9443/carbon/
- Use "admin", "admin" as the username and password.
- If you need to start the OSGi console with the server use the property -DosgiConsole when starting the server
For more details, run, wso2server.sh (wso2server.bat) --help
How to Install Additional Features
You can build your own server by selecting only the features that you require
For further details refer to
Known Issues
All known issues have been recorded at
Training
WSO2 Inc. offers a variety of professional Training Programs, including training on general web services as well as WSO2 Carbon, Apache Axis2, Data Services and a number of other products.
For additional support information please refer to
Support
WSO2 Inc. offers a variety of development and production support programs, ranging from web-based support up through normal business hours, to premium 24x7 phone support.
For additional support information please refer to
For more information on WSO2 Carbon, visit the WSO2 Oxygen Tank (http://wso2.org)
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