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 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!