Among Stars and Planets

From my visit to NASA Ames Research Center:

It's a great place to revise your old lessons on sun, moon, earth and the other planets. If you ever visit this place, check out the cool 3D visual model of the solar system they have on the giant screen. It is controlled by a Wi-Fi operated joystick. They sometimes let the visitors operate the model for a while. I was among the lucky few :)

Apache Synapse 2.0 Released

The Apache Synapse team reached a very important milestone last week. After a long but very busy 2 and half years, we announced the general availability of Apache Synapse version 2.0. The previous release of Synapse was version 1.2 which was released way back in year 2008. The Apache Synapse project has grown a lot in terms of code, features and community over the past 2 years and therefore you will find a horde of new features, improvements, bug fixes and samples in the latest release. Some of the noteworthy new features in this release are:

• New, fine-grained configuration model
• Hot deployment and hot update support for configuration artifacts
• Priority based mediation support
• Comprehensive eventing capabilities with WS-Eventing support
• Secure vault for encrypting passwords in configuration files
• File locking support in the VFS transport for concurrent polling
• URLRewrite mediator for fast and simple URL rewriting
• Synapse configuration observer API
• Multiple identity support in the HTTPS transport
• Enhanced JMX monitoring support for the NHTTP transport
• Dead letter channel implementation (experimental)
• Synapse XAR Maven plug-in for generating configuration artifacts

Apache Synapse is a lightweight Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) released under the Apache Software License. It is based on the tried and tested Apache Axis2 SOAP engine. It has excellent support for SOAP, REST, POX, JSON and a variety of wire level transports (HTTP/S, JMS, File transport, FIX...). The non-blocking HTTP transport of Synapse enables it to handle very high volumes of HTTP traffic over thousands of concurrent connections.

Apache Synapse also supports many WS-* standards including WS-Security, WS-ReliableMessaging, and WS-Policy. It can be easily linked up with any SOA registry for metadata management and governance purposes. Synapse has a very flexible configuration model built into it, which makes it one of the easiest ESB applications to learn and adopt.

If you are involved in any SOA projects or system integration activities, Synapse may have something to offer. So please feel free to grab the binary distro and take it for a spin. Feed back welcome on Synapse user list.

From Fleet Week Air Show

Here are some pictures from the Fleet Week air show held on last October at San Francisco port. The main attraction of the event were the renowned Blue Angels.

(Sorry about the sloppy pictures. I’m not a pro photographer and taking still pictures of some fighter jets travelling close to the speed of sound is probably not the easiest thing in the world.)