Colombo, Sri Lanka and Boston, MA – October 11, 2007 – WSO2, the open source middleware company, announced today that Web services pioneer and Java expert Glen Daniels has joined the company as director of Java platforms. Daniels, who was recently named a vice president of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), brings two decades of software industry experience to the table. He spearheaded the redesign of Apache SOAP, led the creation of Apache Axis, and has contributed significantly to Apache Axis2 and Synapse.

As director of Java platforms, Daniels is responsible for the general technical direction and architectural consistency of all WSO2 Java products. The position formalizes and extends the role that Daniels has been serving as a consultant to WSO2 for the last several months, employing his extensive development expertise to ensure that WSO2 delivers top-of-the-line open source middleware for Java Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

“After personally having worked with Glen on various Apache Web services projects and SOA standards for more than seven years, we share a common commitment to delivering groundbreaking open source solutions for SOA,” said Sanjiva Weerawarana, CEO of WSO2. “As we seek to expand and mature our Java SOA middleware, Glen is the obvious choice to lead this initiative. We are thrilled to have him join the team and look forward to working together in building on the early success of our Java products.”

“WSO2 is a hugely exciting place to be right now,” said Glen Daniels. “I really look forward to bringing the power and flexibility of our existing open source SOA solutions to a broader audience, and working with a great team to deliver on the cool new stuff that we’ve got up our sleeves. Building on our contributions to Apache and our own growing community, we have an incredible opportunity to make the world a better place for SOA developers, and to continue to forge new ground with open source business models.”

Glen Daniels joins WSO2 from his position at Progress (Sonic) Software where he shaped the company’s standards participation, contributed technical and architectural assistance, and championed open source solutions. Prior to Sonic, Daniels was a principal software engineer at Allaire (and then Macromedia) where he drove Web services development, standards, and open source projects. Daniels co-founded a small startup, and has held technical positions with other well-known organizations such as BBN and Reed-Elsevier. He attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).

Daniels has co-authored two editions of “Building Web Services with Java,” an award-winning book providing practical guidance on all aspects of Web services. He also regularly speaks at Web service and XML conferences.

This release features revamped and expanded support for describing and converting types. In addition to support for annotating a Javascript parameter with an XML Schema built-in types, the Javascript types themselves can be "declared" with mappings (and conversions) developed from Javascript types. Support for declaring optional parameters, repeated parameters (arrays), enumerations, and simple object structures have been included. Long running services, simple workflows, and periodic invocation based on simple and familiar browser scheduling constructs such as setTimeout(), setInterval() are also now supported. Improvements in this release are in the ATOM/RSS and APP support along with lots of bug fixes from the version 0.1. The WSO2 Mashup Server is tipped to be a scriptable Web services composition platform that provides for easy invocation of Web Services from within a JavaScript environment. It exposes JavaScript functions as Web service operations, complete with WSDL 2.0 or WSDL 1.1 and XML Schema descriptions, expose them through SOAP 1.2, SOAP 1.1, and REST, and generate a host of artifacts including Javascript/DOM and Javascript/E4X stubs, a try-it page etc. Download the latest version here.

WSO2 Web Services Framework for C (WSO2 WSF/C) released version 1.1 with fixes to WSDL generation, Security and MTOM. WSO2 Web services Framework for PHP (WSO2 WSF/PHP) also released version 1.1 with fixes in these areas. Many memory leaks were also fixed in both releases. WSO2 WSF/C is a standards compliant, enterprise grade, open source, C library for providing and consuming Web services in C. WSO2 WSF/PHP, is a binding of this C framework into PHP and is a PHP extension for providing and consuming Web services in PHP. Download WSF/C 1.1 here and WSF/PHP 1.1 here .