Introducing WSO2 Carbon 4.0

Samisa Abeysinghe speaking about the latest release of WSO2 Carbon.

Rediscover SOA with WSO2 Carbon & WS-Discovery

One of the hottest features of new WSO2 Carbon 3.0 based releases is the out-of-the-box WS-Discovery support. WS-Discovery is a standard protocol for discovering services and service endpoints. This enables service clients to search for services based on a given criteria and bind with the discovered services. The WS-Discovery specification defines two modes of operation:

1. Adhoc mode

In the adhoc mode, servers advertise the services they have using a UDP multicast protocol. Similarly client applications can search for available services by sending out probe requests over UDP multicast. Servers listening for such probe requests can then send the service information to the client over a unicast channel.

2. Managed mode

In the managed mode, servers and clients use an intermediary known as the discovery proxy for all service discovery purposes. Servers will register the available services with the discovery proxy by sending notifications over HTTP. Then clients can directly probe the discovery proxy to discover the registered services. This mode of operation does not use UDP multicast for any sort of communication. All interactions take place over regular HTTP channels and if needed, HTTPS can be used to provide transport level security.

Starting from version 3.0, WSO2 Carbon framework has full support for WS-Discovery managed mode. The following products ship the necessary WS-Discovery libraries with them by default:

• WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS)
• WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
• WSO2 Data Services Server (DSS)
• WSO2 Governance Registry (G-Reg)

WSO2 G-Reg has the ability to act as a discovery proxy. This mode is enabled by default and user doesn't have to configure anything in the G-Reg side. In products like WSAS and DSS, WS-Discovery support should be manually enabled by pointing them to an already existing discovery proxy. Once configured, these server applications will automatically register the services they have with the discovery proxy. Service information will be synchronized with the discovery proxy at server start up, shutdown and service level updates. This ensures that the information in the discovery proxy are always up-to-date. WSO2 ESB can query one or more discovery proxy instances to find the necessary services and service endpoints. The ESB UI also enables creating proxy services and mediation endpoints using the discovered endpoints.

There are lot of other cool things you can do in Carbon platform with WS-Discovery. There are several plug-ins and extensions available to download and try out as well. I'm planning to post a series of blogs addressing various aspects of WS-Discovery in the next few months. So stay tuned! In the meantime read this article to learn how Jos Dirksen integrated Mule with WSO2 G-Reg using the WS-Discovery capabilities of Carbon framework.

WSO2 Carbon Shines in Open Source Space

Awesome news folks!

WSO2 Carbon, the open source SOA platform, the team of which I'm also a part of, has won an award in "InfoWorld Best of Open Source Software (Bossie) 2009". Bossie awards cover a wide range of software categories and WSO2 Carbon won the award in the "Platforms and Middleware" category. With this, WSO2 Carbon has been recognized by InfoWorld as one of top 40 open source products available for business and IT. Here I quote the official announcement from InfoWorld which declares the award winners.

"Two leading lights of open source SOA are MuleSource and WSO2. The Mule ESB takes our prize for the finest enterprise service bus in the open source pantheon, while WSO2 receives a Bossie for its Carbon framework, the basis of a completely componentized SOA platform."

Fantastic.... Given the fact that WSO2 Carbon is still a very new software platform, this is a great achivement indeed. It just shows how fast WSO2 Carbon has matured as a complete SOA platform and how fast its community has expanded in the last few months.

Read the complete publication from InfoWorld and the official news article from WSO2 for more details on this great achievement by the WSO2 Carbon team.

WSO2 Carbon Platform Takes Another Giant Step Forward

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

1. Extensible OSGi component based architecture
2. P2 provisioning based feature enhancement of the server
3. Unified server management framework
4. Unified Management Console
5. Web service, JMX & Equinox OSGi console based administration
6. 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

1. Extract the downloaded zip
2. Go to the bin directory in the extracted folder
3. Run the wso2server.sh or wso2server.bat as appropriate
4. Point you browser to the URL https://localhost:9443/carbon/
5. Use "admin", "admin" as the username and password.
6. 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

• https://wso2.org/wiki/display/carbon/p2-based-provisioning-support

Known Issues

All known issues have been recorded at

• https://wso2.org/jira/browse/CARBON

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

• http://wso2.com/training/course-catalog/

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

• http://wso2.com/support/

For more information on WSO2 Carbon, visit the WSO2 Oxygen Tank (http://wso2.org)

WSO2 ESB 2.0.2 Released...Come and Get it

The WSO2 ESB team is pleased to announce the release of version 2.0.2 of the Open Source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This is a bug fix release of the 2.0 release of WSO2 ESB

WSO2 ESB is a lightweight and easy-to-use Open Source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) available under the Apache Software License v2.0. WSO2 ESB allows administrators to simply and easily configure message routing, intermediation, transformation, logging, task scheduling, etc.. The runtime has been designed to be completely asynchronous, non-blocking and streaming based on the Apache Synapse core.

WSO2 ESB 2.0.2 is developed on top of the revolutionary Carbon platform (Middleware a' la carte), and is based on the OSGi framework to achieve the better modularity for your SOA architecture. This also contains a lots of new features and many other optional components to customize the behavior of the server. Further, if you do not want any of the built in features, you can uninstall those features without any trouble. In other words, this ESB can be customized to your SOA needs.

You can download this distribution from http://wso2.org/downloads/esb and give it a try.

How to Run

1. Extract the downloaded zip
2. Go to the bin directory in the extracted folder
3. Run the wso2server.sh or wso2server.bat as appropriate
4. Point your browser to the URL https://localhost:9443/carbon
5. Use "admin", "admin" as the username and password to login as an admin and create a user account
6. Assign the required permissions to the user through a role
7. If you need to start the OSGi console with the server use the property -DosgiConsole when starting the server
8. Samples configurations can be specified by passing the property -Desb.sample=${SAMPLE_NUMBER}

Key Features

• Proxy services - facilitating transport, interface (WSDL/Schema/Policy), message format (SOAP 1.1/1.2, POX/REST, Text, Binary), QoS (WS-Addressing/WS-Security/WS-RM) and optimization switching (MTOM/SwA).
• Non-blocking HTTP/S transports based on Apache HttpCore for ultrafast execution and support for thousands of connections at high concurreny with constant memory usage.
• Built in Registry/Repository, facilitating dynamic updating and reloading of the configuration and associated resources (e.g. XSLTs, XSD, JS, ..)
• Easily extended via custom Java class (mediator and command)/Spring mediators, or BSF Scripting languages (Javascript, Ruby, Groovy, etc.)
• Built in support for scheduling tasks using the Quartz scheduler.
• Load-balancing (with or without sticky sessions) /Fail-over, and clustered Throttling and Caching support
• WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, Caching and Throttling configurable via (message/operation/service level) WS-Policies
• Lightweight, XML and Web services centric messaging model
• Support for industrial standards (Hessian binary web service protocol/Financial information exchange protocol)
• Enhanced support for the VFS/JMS/Mail transports
• Support for message splitting and aggregation using the EIP
• Database lookup and store support with DBMediators with reusable database connection pools
• JMX monitoring support

New Features of the WSO2 ESB 2.0 (2.0.2)

• This ESB release is based on Carbon "Middleware a' la carte" which is an OSGi based SOA platform by WSO2 Inc.
• Transactional JMS transport and the Transaction mediators
• Integrated graphical user management
• Integrated graphical key store management
• Configurable logging through the management console
• Graphical data source declaration
• WS-Eventing support and Event Sources making it an event broker
• Enhanced sequence and proxy service editor
• Module management capability
• Transport configuration management through the graphical console
• Graceful/Forced shutdown/restart
• Enhanced integrated registry and search functionalities
• User permissions support
• Enhanced monitoring tools for statistics and tracing
• Try-It tool to try an existing service
• Graphical policy editor
• Administration console fully internationalized
• Better modularity and extendability through OSGi component architecture

How You Can Contribute....

Mailing Lists

Join our mailing list and correspond with the developers directly.

• Developer List : esb-java-dev@wso2.org
• User List : esb-java-user@wso2.org

Reporting Issues

WSO2 encourages you to report issues and your enhancement requests for the WSO2 ESB using the public JIRA.

You can also watch how they are resolved, and comment on the progress..

Discussion Forums

Alternatively, questions could be raised using the forums available.

WSO2 ESB Forum : Discussion forum for WSO2 ESB developers/users

Training

WSO2 Inc. offers a variety of professional Training Programs, including training on general Web services as well as WSO2 ESB, Apache Synapse, Apache Axis2 and number of other products.

For additional support information please refer to http://wso2.com/training/course-catalog/

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 http://wso2.com/support/

For more information on WSO2 ESB, visit the WSO2 Oxygen Tank (http://wso2.org)

We welcome your feedback on this implementation. Thank you for your interest in WSO2 ESB.

-- The WSO2 ESB Team --

Carbonizing SOA

It's probably bit late to blog regarding this subject, but what the heck? After all, late is better than never.

WSO2 folks released their flagship product, the mother of all open source SOA solutions, WSO2 Carbon – Middleware a la carte. It is a componentized, customizable SOA platform built on Equinox and OSGi. The platform can be configured and tailored to suit the enterprise architecture of any business organization. Among the major components of the Carbon platform are;

1.WSO2 Web Services Application Server 3.0
2.WSO2 ESB 2.0
3.WSO2 Registry 2.0
4.WSO2 Business Process Server 1.0

All these high level components share the same set of core Carbon modules. It is really exciting to see how those high level middleware solutions combine with the core Carbon framework to deliver the results. Sounds interesting? Feel like learning more? Here you can find an introductory presentation on WSO2 Carbon. It gives a good insight into this revolutionary product and its architecture. Also don't forget to checkout other related articles and presentations on WSO2 Oxygen Tank.