WSO2 Excels at NBQSA

WSO2 bagged four awards at the 12th National Best Quality Software Awards (NBQSA) held last week. NBQSA is an annual competition organized by the Sri Lankan chapter of the BCS. Every year many corporate firms, government organizations, tertiary education institutes and individuals take part in this event. The competition is pretty intense and the winners are also given the opportunity to take part in international events such as APICTA.

This year WSO2 really made their presence felt at NBQSA by winning the following four awards:

• Bronze award for tools and infrastructure apps category - WSO2 Data Services Server
• Silver award for research and development category - WSO2 Gadget Server
• Gold award for tools and infrastructure apps category - WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus
• Glod award for overall victory - WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus

I feel truly proud to be a part of such a dynamic team as the WSO2. Three cheers to WSO2 and all the folks who worked with WSO2 (in past and present) and made these achievements possible.

WSO2 ESB 3.0.1 Up for Grabs

Last week we released WSO2 ESB 3.0.1. This release contains a number of important bug fixes and we highly recommend everyone using WSO2 ESB 3.0.0 to upgrade to the latest release as soon as possible. Please note that this is only a bug fix release and as such it doesn't contain any new features over 3.0.0. Therefore any configuration can be easily migrated to the 3.0.1 from 3.0.0.

Some of the significant fixes available in this release are:

• Fixes to the hot deployment/hot update implementation
• Fixes to the built-in patch model
• Transport fixes (particularly in the NHTTP and FIX transports)
• An Axis2 security fix

To make a long story short, there are more than one reason to migrate to WSO2 ESB 3.0.1. So download your copy today.

From Quadricycle to the Prius

I went to see the California Automobile Museum a few days back. It's located in Sacramento and displays a wide range of classic cars and a few modern cars. If you are an automobile fanatic, this is the place to be. I don't consider myself to be a total car fanatic, but even I loved the place. It's a great place to learn and experience the history of automobile industry and admire the long journey the human race has come in search of faster and safer ways of transportation.

Here are some highlights from my visit:

Experiencing the Nature at Lake Tahoe

A couple of weeks back I was in Auburn, California. During my stay, I got the opportunity to visit the lake Tahoe. It's only a 2-3 hours drive to the magnificent lake from Auburn. Here are some of the breath taking sceneries around the lake.....

Truly awesome experience!

FIX Your SOA with WSO2 ESB

I believe WSO2 ESB is the ONLY complete enterprise service bus which supports the FIX (Financial Information eXchange) protocol. The FIX transport of WSO2 ESB enables the service bus to communicate with FIX acceptors and initiators. FIX messages received by the service bus can be routed, filtered or transformed using the existing set of mediators. If needed, FIX messages can be transformed and sent to external systems over different protocols such as HTTP and JMS.

I published an article titled "FIX Your SOA with WSO2 ESB" which explains how to setup the FIX transport in WSO2 ESB 3.0 and how to use it to implement a variety of integration scenarios. It gives a good overview on how to develop high performance finance data routing systems using WSO2 ESB. Hope you'll like it!

Axis2 TCP Transport Revamped

I recently did some major improvements to the Axis2 TCP transport. The TCP transport enables Axis2 services and clients to send/receive SOAP messages over TCP, using Java TCP sockets. The old TCP transport was very simple and it must be configured globally in the axis2.xml file. Due to this limitation, a service could not open up its own port to listen to incoming TCP messages. All the TCP requests were captured by a single, globally configured port and WS-Addressing headers were used to dispatch the requests to the appropriate services.

The new transport implementation is fairly advanced with a wide range of configuration options. It can be configured globally in the axis2.xml file, or it can be configured at the service level in the corresponding services.xml files. Only the port number was configurable in the previous TCP transport implementation. The new implementation supports all the parameters described below:

• transport.tcp.port - Port number (mandatory parameter)
• transport.tcp.hostname - The host name to which the server socket should be bound
• transport.tcp.backlog - The length of the message back log for the server socket (defaults to 50)
• transport.tcp.contentType - Content type of requests (defaults to text/xml)

In the new transport, if a request is received by a port configured at the service level, it is pre-dispatched to the corresponding service. If the global port receives a TCP message, WS-Addressing headers will be looked up while dispatching.

These improvements are now available in the Axis2 trunk. So feel free to take it for a ride and give us your feedback. I also have some plans to make some improvements to the Axis2 UDP transport. I intend to add multicast support to the existing UDP transport and with that we will be able to support multicast request – unicast response message exchange pattern in Axis2.