WSO2 Business Activity Monitor

WSO2 Business Activity Monitor, allows monitoring Service Mediation/Invocation data. The data is captured real time, and could be used for decision making activities. BAM is extensible and can be used to custom monitoring needs as well.



For more information click here. Also Samisa's podcast is available here

Federated registries and crawlers

Deepal has revealed some of the things we discussed over the chat during the last weekend regarding web services discovery mechanisms.
I started to look into WSO2 registry to help with another PhD student but didn’t have much time to dig into the architecture level as I was busy during last week with my studies.
Yeah… the problem with having multiple registries in a heterogeneous environment is that it makes really difficult to find web services information, which is essential part in SOA. As web services grows from hundreds to thousands, the consumers or the clients need to have an efficient way to locate them. And publishers also need to attract clients without going through other marketing channels and gimmicks.
One such approach is discussed in this paper, which uses a crawler engine to find web services. In this approach the Crawler Engine (WSCE) actively crawls excising UBRs and search engines to collect web services information. Thus a system can maintain most up-to-date information about available web services. Web services information can be found using existing web services registries and web services portals. And also via search engines, which is becoming popular.

[Source : Eyhab, A.-M. and H.M. Qusay, Investigating web services on the world wide web, in Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web. 2008, ACM: Beijing, China]

But using search engines too have limitations as they do not recognize web services with basic service properties such as binding information, ports, operations etc. And search engines can cache/store WSDL documents but there is no business-centric model or adhering to web services standards.

Another approach discussed in this paper is to form a federation of registries. The current search facilities offered by the latest version of UDDI do not offer any special features for finding Web service registries depending on the business domains. And it is difficult to have a design and execution autonomy for affiliated registries. The approach discusses in the paper allows peer to peer network of private, semi-private and public UDDI registries, which allow transparent access to registries in a federated environment. Following are the essential features of the approach

-Participating registries are autonomous registries that can be private or public
-Participating registries can be part of multiple federations
-Participating registries can be heterogeneous. Can have different data models and APIs
-Participating registries can arbitrary join and leave the federation. This is something that we cannot achieve with the UDDI replication support in V3
-Participating registries will have the design and execution autonomy
-The federation of registries can be formed as a market place for common interests
-The XTRO or the extended registries ontology provides a way o do complex queries across federations

So, in overall there is a requirement of adhering to a common standards as well as developing mechanisms to retrieve web services information from the repositories built upon multiple standards. IMO the latter is much better as it does not limit to a particular standard. (Lessons from the history)

Experience the interoperability with Stock Trader 2.0

Without going thru all the hazzle with nitty gritty configurations, now you can experience the power of interoperability with Stock Trader example. WSO2 developer portal aka Oxygen tank has a project page to help you find the examples in many different flavors including PHP, Java, Ruby, Spring, Perl and Python. Try Stock Trader with .Net Stock Trader 2.0
Also better to read this explanation from Jonathan Marsh and Greg Leek.

My first talk at Swinburne

Tomorrow I'm going to talk about Myself, Apache Software Foundation and WSO2. And also about the community that ASF has developed and how ASF works by bringing developers and users together.
The second part of the talk is about WSO2, where we developed many web services middleware for the Apache Software Foundation and hence for the open source community.
The interesting fact is that some staff members including PhD students here knows about Oxygentank but not about WSO2. :)

Two achievements...

I am very thrilled with two achievements recently grabbed by two of my WSO2 colleagues.

1irst

Paul, who is a co-founder of WSO2, has become one of the TOP 25 CTOs of 2008 nominated by InfoWorld . Technically I have learned a lot from him and he is one of the great persons to talk about web services.
His expertise definitely helped to bring WSO2 to where is is right now and a very cool guy to talk about serious stuff.

2econd

Deepal who's a colleague of mine in WSO2 and also a batch mate from University of Moratuwa has written a book. Still he didn't give me a free copy ;-) but you can get it from here.
The book contains information about mostly used features of Axis2 web services engine and a must have in your shelf if you are using the engine to consume/deploy web services. Besides it's from the hands of some one who's a key figure behind the success of Axis2.

Congratulations to both of you...

Cardspace authenitcation with Identity Solution

WSO2 Identity solution 1.5 has been released. The new version supports SAML 2.0, which is a very handy feature to have.
Check more details about the release here.
You can also listen to this podcast by Prabath Siriwardena

Spring the WSF/*

Adding yet another member to the WSF family WSO2 has announced the release of WSF/Spring 1.0.
Similar to other WSF products, this too is released under the Apache license 2.0. Now the spring users would be able to expose web services using the famous Apache Axis2/Java engine. The framework is also powered by the WS-* of implementations including WS-Security, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Policy, WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging and WS-Eventing. Here you will find a quick start guide.

WSO2 Web Services Framework for C language

As the B2B communication becomes loosely coupled and automated in a distributed environment, web services technology is blooming as the perfect solution for numerous business applications. With the ability of multiple legacy applications to be integrated to form a single system and allowing various clients, dispersed in contrasting platforms in different coordinates of the world to communicate are the major challenges faced by many software architects and developers.
As a solution for this WSO2 has introduced a series of web services middle-ware that can be used to implement your business application. Amongst them WSO2 Web services framework for C (WSF/C) can become appealing to the C, C++ community.
If you are a PHP or Ruby developer you have the option of using respective extensions of WSF/C in these languages. Please check WSF/PHP and WSF/Ruby for more details.

Training : SOAP and WS-Security in PHP

16th Wednesday...

If you are a PHP developer and would like to learn, how to deploy or consume web services, there are live on-line training sessions available in WSO2 developer portal.
Check this out...
This is a three hour course that brings you the essentials for building quick, inter-operable and secure applications using web services.
There are some other courses too. The complete course list can be seen here.

WSO2 WSF/C 1.2.0 is released

The Web Services Framework for C (WSF/C) is an open source library written to provide and consume web services in C programming language. The framework is released under Apache license 2.0. That means it comes with a $0 cost and liberty to redistribute.
WSF/C also integrates many Apache projects. Using the famous Apache Axis2/C as the web services engine, it has also accoutered with Apache Rampart/C, Apache Sandesha2/C and Apache Savan/C.
Armed by all these WSF/C provides web services security, reliability and eventing support with just a single download. And it is inter-operable with Microsoft .Net, WSO2 Web Services Application Server and other J2EE implementation.
Moreover, WSO2 WSF/C is the base framework for other web service frameworks like WSF/PHP and WSF/Ruby.
WSO2 Team has announced the release of 1.2.0 last week. You may download the release here

WSO2's WSF/PHP and Apache Ramaprt/C

Following diagram shows how the WSO2 WSF/PHP is arranged...



Basically the WSO2 WSF/PHP is a PHP extension. It can be seen as the upper layer of a 3-core wire.
And inside it there is another layer wrapping many other products, which we call the WSO2 WSF/C. These products are the implementations of WS-* of specifications including Apache Rampart/C, Apache Sandesha2/C, Apache Savan/C.
A PHP user will basically consume/provide web services by using the upper WSF/PHP layer. The core specifications and implementations are transparent to the PHP user to make the life easier. But sometimes it's worth to know how exactly are the inner components arranged. :)

In order to provide security, WSO2 WSF/PHP uses Apache Rampart/C. Actually via WSO2 WSF/C. Apache Rampart/C is the security module for the Apache Axis2/C engine, which the WSF/PHP depends on. You may refer my this blog entryto see how to write a PHP script to encrypt a SOAP message.