New Capabilities in WSO2 Open Source Integration Platform Enhance Service and Process Orchestration of Internet of Things Applications

WSO2 Message Broker 3.0 and WSO2 ESB 4.9 support MQTT; WSO2 Business Process Server 3.5 adds Activiti engine supporting BPMN 2.0; WSO2 Data Services Server 3.5 adds OData 4.0 to expose data as APIs

Mountain View, CA – November 3, 2015 – The Internet of Things (IoT) is fostering new business models across a range of markets, such as transportation, healthcare, automotive, and manufacturing, among others. However, implementing these models depends on the ability to integrate information from IoT devices with enterprise systems and act on it. Today, WSO2 introduced new capabilities in the WSO2 Integration Platform that enhance service and process orchestration for IoT-driven applications:

  • WSO2 Message Broker 3.0 and WSO2 Enterprise Bus (WSO2 ESB) 4.9 now support Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), the lightweight messaging protocol widely adopted for connecting IoT devices, sensors and gateways.
  • WSO2 Business Process Server (WSO2 BPS) 3.5 has added the open source Activiti business process management (BPM) engine, which supports the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2.0 specification, recognized as one of the most IoT-aware approaches to process modeling.
  • WSO2 Data Services Server (WSO2 DSS) 3.5 adds support for the Open Data (OData) 4.0 protocol, providing the ability to query data from a range of sources via standard, open RESTful APIs that can work across IoT and mobile devices, as well as the Web, cloud and enterprise systems.

In addition to WSO2 Message Broker, WSO2 ESB, and WSO2 BPS, the WSO2 Integration Platform also includes WSO2 API Manager, which was enhanced in June 2015 to enable API-driven control over IoT devices, and WSO2 Application Server. With 2.2 trillion customer transactions per year running through the platform and individual enterprises deployments handling billions of transactions daily, the WSO2 Integration Platform provides the proven scalability and reliability to handle high volumes of IoT interactions. Additionally, all products in the platform are fully cloud-enabled, so the same software can be deployed on servers and in the cloud. This provides the deployment flexibility required by enterprises that frequently rely on hybrid environments for their IoT solutions.

“Increasingly, we’re seeing global enterprise customers standardize on our WSO2 Integration Platform for their IoT implementations, ranging from transportation to automotive, manufacturing, construction, healthcare, communications, and smart cities,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder, CEO and chief architect. “With the addition of support for MQTT to connect with IoT devices, BPMN 2.0 for IoT-aware process modeling, and OData 4.0 for IoT-accessible data APIs, we are building on our commitment to delivering open, industry standard technologies that address enterprises’ IoT solution demands.”

WSO2 Message Broker 3.0

The fully open source WSO2 Message Broker is a lightweight, easy-to-use, distributed message-brokering server. It features high availability (HA) support with a complete hot-to-hot continuous availability mode, the ability to scale up to several servers in a cluster, and no single point of failure. It also is designed to manage persistent messaging and large numbers of queues, subscribers and messages.

With version 3.0, Message Broker adds new features and enhancements to provide enterprises with a scalable and distributed architecture for easily managing the high messaging volume demands of IoT solutions.

  • New support for MQTT extends enterprise messaging to IoT. The lightweight MQTT protocol connects remote devices and sensors, establishing machine-to-machine (M2M) communications that generate millions of concurrent events per second.
  • A new relational database plug-in feature lets developers easily configure and plug-in their existing relational databases to handle their message storage.
  • A new scalable message storage and replication mechanism builds on the HA capabilities first introduced with WSO2 Message Broker 2.0 to easily scale the messaging system based on the growth of messaging volume and size.
  • New functionality for server cluster coordination in the enhanced distributed architecture eliminates the need for third-party technologies, such as ZooKeeper, which in turn reduces deployment complexity and maintenance demands.

WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 4.9

WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus is based and expands on the Apache Synapse ESB to provide a lightweight, highly configurable mediation platform. The 100% open source WSO2 ESB lets administrators and developers conveniently configure message routing, mediation, transformation, logging, task scheduling, failover, load balancing, and more. It also supports all standard enterprise integration patterns and enables transport switching, eventing, rule-based mediation, and priority-based mediation for advanced integration requirements. The WSO2 ESB runtime is designed to stream large data sets and be completely asynchronous and non-blocking.

WSO2 ESB 4.9 offers several new features that support the integration of IoT with enterprise systems, as well as facilitate integration across enterprise applications and services. Among them:

  • Several new inbound endpoints enable transports to work in multi-tenant environments. In addition to MQTT, they include the HTTP, HTTPS, File, Java Message Service (JMS), Health Level 7 (HL7), Kafka, Apache CXF Reliable Messaging, and RabbitMQ protocols.
  • New functionality for creating custom inbound endpoints enables developers to build the functionality they need for their scenarios if it is not already supported.
  • The new WSO2 Store at https://store.wso2.com/store offers 100-plus connectors— including eBay, GitHub, Salesforce, and Twitter, among others—that developers can download and connect to, in order to interact with various third-party products.

WSO2 Business Process Server 3.5

WSO2 Business Process Server provides enterprise-grade approach functionality for efficient business process management. Powered by the Apache Orchestration Director Engine (ODE) BPEL engine, it enables developers to easily deploy business processes and models using the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL). WSO2 BPS also features a Web-based graphical management console that allows users to easily deploy, manage and view processes and tasks.

With version 3.5, WSO2 BPS adds the Activiti BPM engine, which supports BPMN 2.0, the specification recognized as one of the most IoT-aware approaches to process modeling. As a result, developers have the flexibility to use WS-BPEL or BPMN 2.0 to write their business processes, depending on their requirements. In addition to Activiti, WSO2 BPS 3.5 enriches the BPMN 2.0 environment with:

  • A customizable Web application for viewing and managing BPMN processes and tasks.
  • BPMN user task form generation support.
  • BPMN runtime statistics publishing functionality.
  • Reporting dashboards for BPMN and human tasks.

WSO2 BPS 3.5 also adds a customizable Web application supporting the WS-Human Tasks standard, as well as functionality for human task user interface (UI) form generation.

WSO2 Data Services Server 3.5

WSO2 Data Services Server enables database administrators and database programmers to create and manage WS-* style Web services and REST-style Web resources using enterprise data.

Version 3.5 adds support for the open, standard OData 4.0 protocol, which enables the use of RESTful APIs to query data from a range of sources. In addition to relational databases, OData allows many previously inaccessible data sources to be exposed as APIs, including Not Only SQL (NoSQL) databases, file systems, content management systems, and websites, among others. Using the OAuth 2.0 open standard for authorization, WSO2 DSS 3.5 also adds the ability to access data from Google spreadsheets via an API. The open, standard APIs available through OData 4.0 and OAuth 2.0 can work across the many platforms on which organizations rely, from IoT and mobile devices to the Web, cloud and enterprise systems.

Proven Scalability, Flexible Deployment

The WSO2 Integration Platform, as part of the WSO2 enterprise middleware platform, provides core capabilities to support high scalability and deployment flexibility.

  • WSO2’s inherently cloud-enabled software means the same products can migrate between servers, private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid cloud environments, maximizing deployment flexibility.
  • WSO2 offers the only platform with a highly distributed, modular architecture in which all products are built on components designed to work together. As a result, product components can be decoupled and allocated to different compute resources, making it easy to scale to meet growing demand; today WSO2’s software is powering customer deployments where daily transactions number in the billions.
  • The WSO2 platform also helps companies to reduce complexity and speed time to market, since the products are designed to work together and share a consistent set of enterprise-class capabilities including management, security, clustering, logging, statistics, and tracing, among others.

The WSO2 platform is fully open source under the Apache License 2.0 and based on open standards. It provides a highly extensible architecture, which includes support for loose coupling, so IT teams can readily integrate existing systems, as well as incorporate new technologies as they emerge. Importantly, fully open source means the enterprise version of each WSO2 software product is also the community version, so enterprises don’t have to trade away the flexibility of open source licensing to get robust enterprise-grade functionality.

Deployment Options, Licensing and Support

WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 4.9, WSO2 Business Process Server 3.5, and WSO2 Data Services Server 3.5 are generally available today, and WSO2 Message Broker 3.0 will be generally available by mid-November 2015. All of the software products are provided as software downloads that can run directly on servers or on top of a private PaaS, and as a WSO2 Cloud Virtual Machine running on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), and VMware ESX. Additionally, customers can choose to have WSO2 host the products through the WSO2 Managed Cloud service. As fully open source solutions released under the Apache License 2.0, they do not carry any licensing fees.

WSO2 software is backed by a world-class technical team with in-depth knowledge of the middleware. In addition to production support, WSO2 service and support options include evaluation support, development support, and special QuickStartSM consulting programs.

About WSO2

WSO2 delivers on the promise of the connected business with the only completely integrated enterprise platform that enables businesses to build, integrate and manage their APIs, applications, and Web services on-premises, in the cloud, and on mobile devices. Leading enterprise customers worldwide rely on WSO2’s award-winning 100% open source platform and its robust governance and DevOps functionality for their mission-critical applications. Today, these businesses represent nearly every sector: health, financial, retail, logistics, manufacturing, travel, technology, telecom and more. Visit https://wso2.com or check out the WSO2 community on the WSO2 Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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