Two Years at WSO2

The beginning of this month marked the completion of my second year at WSO2. Its been a great two years at that. Initially I was involved in helping improve the Axis2 IDEA plugging for the 1.1 release. This was my first steps with Axis2 and that helped me gain the committership for Axis2 later that year. The Axis2 1.1 release was a very important one and one of my batch mates Thilina was the release manager.

My involvement with Axis2 was propelled by the fact that I got the opportunity to attend the WSDL 2.0 interop in France which was held from the 14th to the 18th of November that year.

Members at the WSDL 2.0 interop.

This was just 2 months after I had joined WSO2. I went to the interop along with Chinthaka. We had the chance to pay a visit to the Eiffel tower as well as the world famous Louvre museum.
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At Eiffel

At Louvre

By the time we went to the interop I was not too familiar with the internals of Axis2, I was just providing a helping hand to Chinthaka. But that trip threw me into the deep end of Axis2. The time frame given to the working group was to end on the 31st of December and they needed two independent implementations to pull the spec through. We were one of the implementations and we had more work to do, especially on the http binding. The other implementation was from canon and they were not interested in implementing the http binding (They did support us by implementing a subset of the http binding though) so we had the added pressure and to make matters worse (or you could look at it as provide me more opportunity ) Chinthaka was leaving for grad school early December. So I was charged with the responsibility of implementing these stuff. That was how I got into the internals of Axis2.

Although I worked on Axis2 full time at the start later on I moved on to work on the WSO2 Mashup Server. Even though I've been working on the Mashup Server ever since, I've always been in close proximity with Axis2. That has been for 2 main reasons. One is that I love working on Axis2 and the second been the fact that Axis2 is the foundation of most of the products at WSO2 including the Mashup Server.