Committed to Apache Xerces

The Apache Xerces community granted me committer status for Apache Xerces2-J. The vote was called in just a few days back and it was officially closed on 8th of April (yesterday). Xerces2-J is an open source library for parsing, validating and manipulating XML documents. It is the most matured and most standard complaint XML parser available for Java applications today. 

Apache Xerces used to be a subproject of the Apache XML project but due to the immense popularity and high adoption rate that Xerces continued to exhibit, it became a top level project in year 2004. Presently Apache Xerces is a collection of four sub projects.

• Apache Xerces C++
  
• Apache Xerces2 Java
  
• Apache Xerces Perl
  
• Apache XML Commons
  

The original code base which formed the foundation of Xerces C++ and Xerces-J was developed at IBM and donated to ASF in year 1999. Therefore Apache Xerces happens to be one of the oldest projects of the ASF as well. In fact Xerces is nearly as old as the ASF itself and will be celebrating its 10th anniversary this November. Given all the facts and figures, it is indeed a great honour to be a part of such a majestic open source project :)

Talking about Apache Xerces2-J, it supports a large number of XML and XML related standards and APIs. The latest released version (2.9.1) supports the following specs.

• XML 1.0 (4th Edition)
  
• Namespaces in XML 1.0 (2nd Edition)
  
• XML 1.1 (2nd Edition)
  
• Namespaces in XML 1.1 (2nd Edition)
  
• W3C XML Schema 1.0 (2nd Edition)
  
• XInclude 1.0 (2nd Edition)
  
• OASIS XML Catalogs 1.1
  
• SAX 2.0.2
  
• DOM Level 3 Core, Load and Save
  
• DOM Level 2 Core, Events, Traversal and Range
  
• JAXP 1.3
  

Due to the performance levels achievable through Xerces and its high level of standard compliancy, hundreds of open source projects and other commercial software applications make use of Xerces2-J. It is fair enough to say that Xerces2-J is the most widely used XML parser in the Java world. If you have a Java application which does some XML related stuff it's very likely that Xerces2-J is somewhere in your application's classpath. People sometimes use it even without knowing that they are actually using Xerces2-J. Sun Microsystems ships Xerces2-J with their JDK. This enables Sun JDK users to develop XML parsing applications powered by Xerces2-J without having to explicitly put the Xerces2-J jars in the project classpaths. However folks at Sun Microsystems have changed the Xerces2-J package name from org.apache.xerces.* to com.sun.org.apache.xerces.* which in my opinion is being a little ungrateful :(

Nowadays we are working on getting Xerces2-J to support the new XML Schema 1.1 specification from W3C. In fact I started contributing to Xerces2-J by implementing a XML Schema 1.1 feature as a Google Summer of Code participant, last year. I've been taking part in mailing list discussions and fixing bugs ever since. The Xerces2-J community is rather small but there's a very helpful and friendly bunch of experienced developers there, who have dedicated their lives and careers to Xerces. That encourages young developers like me to do more and more towards the betterment of the project, as and when the time permits.

MOINC and Scalability

My colleague Aravinda just published a cool post on his blog regarding the scalability testing round we carried out on MOINC a few weeks back. He has also published some charts illustrating the results of our tests. Have a look and see for yourself.

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 --

ApacheCon EU 2009....Finishing Touches

The ApacheCon EU 2009 (Amsterdam, Netherlands) came to an end today evening. We had a BarCamp on 23rd followed by a Hackathon on 24th. The conference commenced on 25th and continued until today evening. We had two keynotes and around 64 technical presentations during the last three days. I was fortunate enough to take part in the following presentations.

• Embrace OSGi (by Carsten Ziegeler, member of ASF)
• Tales from OSGi trenches (by Bertrand Delacretaz, member of ASF)
• OSGi as a framework for building a product line (by Ruwan Linton and Afkham Azeez, WSO2)
• HBasics: Hadoop's big database (by Michael Stack, Microsoft)
• Apache license as a business model (by Paul Fremantle, WSO2)
• Clustered Web services for high availability and scalability (by Ruwan Linton, WSO2)
• EDA with Apache Synapse (by Paul Fremantle, WSO2)
• Performance tuning Apache Tomcat (by Filip Hanik, SpringSource)
• How to become a project at ASF (by Martijn Dashorst)
• Introduction to NIO 2.0 (by Jeanfrancois Arcand)
• Using MINA 2.0 (by Emmanuel Lecharmy, IKTEK)
• Becoming a Tomcat super user (by mark Thomas, SpringSource)
• High availability != High cost (by Norman Maurer, HEAG MediaNet)
• Apache POI (by Nick Burch, Torchbox)
• Enterprise build & test in the cloud (Carlos Sanchez, G2iX)
• Shindig for blogs and wikis (Dave Johnson, VP Apache Roller)

I also got the opportunity to chair most of the above sessions thanks to the organizers and folks of the Apache TAC. Thanks guys! You rock!

Out of the two keynotes, I really enjoyed the keynote on 'open sourcing the analyst business' by James Governor. It was a real blast!

In addition to all the technical knowledge I gathered during the conference I also made quite a lot of new friends. I met some very interesting people working at various levels and projects of the ASF. All in all it was a very successful ApacheCon, not just to me but to everybody that participated. (I have a lot more to mention but unfortunately I have to cut it short. I have lot of packing left to do before I start the return journey tomorrow morning.)

Happy Birthday ASF

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) celebrates its 10th anniversary today. Having finished the regular activities of the ApacheCon scheduled for the day, all the committers, PMC members and members got together to celebrate this great occasion. Jim Jagielski, the chairman of the ASF board of directors cut the giant birth day cake. It was indeed a fun filled and proud moment for everyone at Apache. Another important event that took place during the reception was the key signining party where around 20 folks including myself, got the opportunity to get signed PGP keys from ASF.

All in all it was a great birth day party with loads of fun and excitement. Happy 10th anniversary ASF!!!

ApacheCon EU 2009 Begins

After a 3 hour flight from Sri Lanka to India followed by an 8 hour flight from India to Netherlands, I finally arrived at beautiful Amsterdam city, to take part in the ApacheCon Europe 2009. The event is now being held at the Movenpick hotel at the Amsterdam city center. The main attraction of the first day was BarCamp Apache where a number of developers, committers and open source geeks like me presented on a variety of topics. I myself conducted a presentation on Apache Synapse and how it can be used to scale up Web Services deployments. Among the other presentations I really liked the presentation by Ricardo Varela on software for mobile platforms and the presentation by Ross Gardler on teaching open source. Sri Lankan student community was credited for their achievements in the last Google Summer of Code during the presentation by Ross :)

All in all it was a really awesome BarCamp with lots of great talks, t-shirts, sweets and coffee. Let's see how the things turn out tomorrow.