Apache Axis2 1.4.1 Released

Yes the subject says it all. The main reason for putting out a 1.4.1 release a was security vulnerability present in Apache Axis2 1.4 policy processing. The 1.4.1 release fixes this security issue plus a few critical issues that were present in the 1.4 release.

Nandana who primarily works on Axis2 and Rampart noticed this security vulnerability and sent a note to the Axis2 list who decided to push for a 1.4.1. Of course Nandana volunteered to be the release Manager ;).

This exemplifies the beauty of Open Source. After all the Open Source mantra is "Release early, release often".

Mooshup has been upgraded

Mooshup has been upgraded and is running the 1.5.1 release of the WSO2 Mashup Server. Please have a look at the release note which includes all the features added in this new release.

The latest release is equipped with quite a few cool features which I plan to exploit in the coming days. If you are into mashups then I encourage you to visit Mooshup which is an online version of the WSO2 Mashup Server and get a feel of what the WSO2 Mashup Server can offer.

Learn About the Enterprise Capabilities in the WSO2 Mashup Server

There were several feature additions in the 1.5 release of the WSO2 Mashup Server. Among them were features that enable you to author Enterprise level mashups with ease. These features include support for message-level security (Authentication, Integrity ,Confidentiality) on mashups, and the ability to expose data sources such as a relational database, an Excel spreadsheet or a simple CSV file as a zero-coding Data Service.

Want to learn how to use these cool enterprise features in the WSO2 Mashup Server? Join this free webinar that will be presented by Jonathan Marsh the Director of Architecture for Mashup Technologies at WSO2.

WSO2 Mashup Server 1.5.1 Released

Its been just more over two weeks since we did the 1.5 release of the Mashup Server. This release fixes a couple of bugs that were present in the 1.5 release and also adds a few features (little) that we though were important. The bug fixes include

• E-mail host object fix
• Auto-generated stubs of data services fix
  

A few of the features (little) we've included are

• Fixes to JMS and SMTP transports (Tried and Tested)
• Ability to try services over JMS and SMTP (via script injection)
• Provide the ability to manage a users private key
• Minor usability issues fixed

You can have a look at the full list of fixes here. This release adds value to the plenty of cool features we added to the 1.5 release. Download it and tryit out yourself as its available freely under the Apache License.

As Jonathan has mentined in his blog post I will be working on a article on how you could use the JMS and SMTP transports with the Mashup Server. You would be amazed on how easy it is to do so...

Benefits of an Open Source SOA solution

Stumbled upon an interesting article on the benefits of an Open Source SOA solution, and I cant agree more with it. It lists 5 advantages of using Open Source to leverage SOA needs. They are,

• Try before you buy
• Lower cost of entry
• Cost effective support
• Core competency
• For the people by the people
  

Let me elaborate on point 4 above (Core competency) with respect to WSO2. At WSO2 we've build a complete SOA platform from scratch. The core components we use was designed with SOA in mind. They were not mere afterthoughts.

The article also mentions WSO2 as a major open source stack provider. And its a pretty impressive stack at that, at WSO2 the whole SOA stack we have is open source. Products of this stack include the Fastest Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in the form of the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), the award winning WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS a runtime for hosting services), the WSO2 Registry, the WSO2 Mashup Server (which helps you compose services using JavaScript with the E4X extension). In addition to this it also provides frameworks such as WSF/Spring, WSF/C and WSF C++ which help build/invoke services. It has also extended its frameworks to the various scripting languages in the form of WSF/PHP, WSF/Ruby, WSF/Python and WSF/Perl. All these frameworks help you build/invoke enterprise grade services which may have WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Addressing etc...

WSO2 has been around for around 3 years and thats a pretty impressive product portfolio for a company that young.

WSO2 Mashup Server 1.5 released

Its been a couple of busy weeks and the effort is worth it. We've been busy working on the Mashup Server 1.5 release which has a bunch of new features.

The following are some of the new features in this release,

1. Integrated Data Services Support - Users can now create Data Services using the Mashup Server itself. Data Services makes it trivial to expose data locked up in databases, csv files or excel spreadsheets.
2. Ability to Secure Mashups - Users can now secure mashups running on the Mashup Server by the click of a button. The Mashup Server ships with 15 most commonly used security scenarios which are based on WS-Security. This allows users to control access to their mashups.
3. Ability to call Secure Services with ease - Calling secure services has never been this easy. Users can call secured services using the Mashup Server by just writing a couple of lines of JavaScript code.
4. Support for gadgets - Any mashup running on the Mashup Server can be exposed as a google gadget which can be hosted on the Mashup Server itself or igoogle.
5. Personalized Dashboard - The Mashup Server can also act as a personalized dashboard. More details on that can be found here.
6. OpenID login support - In the previous release we introduced infocard based login support and in this release we've gone even further and added openID based login support which is powered by the WSO2 Identity Solution.
7. Service Lifecycle support - Service Lifecycle helps manage life cycle of a particular mashup you deploy in the WSO2 Mashup Server.

There are just a few of the features we've added to this new release. For full details please refer the release note. Stay tuned for more details and usages of these features. We'll be upgrading mooshup to use this new release in the coming days. Until then if you wanna try the WSO2 Mashup Server please feel free to download it cause its available freely under the Apache License.

Tough Competition Brings Out The Best

India vs Pakistan is big when it comes to anything. Cricket is no different to that and India vs Pakistan is one of the most hard fought contest you could ever find. India and Pakistan clashed in a crucial Asia Cup 2008 match yesterday. What a clinical chase it was by Pakistan who hunted down the mammoth 308 scored by India. Pakistan was under pressure as they had already lost to Sri Lanka and they needed a victory to keep there hopes alive of getting into the finals. Sri Lanka had already booked their place in the final.

On a placid batsman friendly wicket India posted 308. Chasing down anything over 300 is not easy and to do it under so much pressure takes a lot of courage. Whats more Pakistan were without their regular captain Shoaib Malik and it was Misbah-ul-Haq who had to fill his shoes. Misbah is new to the scene having played just 39 matches and he showed tremendous maturity in yesterday's Match.

What I want to highlight here is that Tough Competition Brings Out The Best. It can bring out the best of a person, company or even a Product. Thats exactly what happened in yesterday's match. Pakistan was under so much pressure and that brought the best out of Misbah-ul-Haq and Younis Khan.

The same can be said about software. Lets take the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for example. We did some performance testing on comparing the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) with some other Open Source and proprietary ESBs. If you take a look at Round 1 and Round 2 you would see that the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) was the fastest. Now take a look at the latest (Round 3) results too. The proprietary ESB which was slower in the previous rounds showed better performance. Competition brought the best out of it. I'm pretty sure that this result will encourage our ESB team to perform better next time. Tough competition is always good and it helps us improve our selves.

The same can be said about the WSO2 Registry. This has stiff competition from Mule Galaxy another open source registry. You can see a comparison of the WSO2 Registry and Mule Galaxy here which was done by Deepal.