WSO2 Carbon, WSO2 API Manager and WSO2 Governance Registry Increase Speed, Scalability and High Availability Through Hazelcast

Newest releases of WSO2’s cloud-enabled middleware introduce an industry first with multi-profile support; add synchronous deployment of artifacts and support for Hazelcast

Palo Alto, CA – October 30, 2013 – Enterprises are embracing the cloud, mobile, APIs and social networking to create new connections across employees, customers and partners. These connected businesses are realizing new models of agility, business collaboration, monetization and efficiency, but they also face new demands on the performance and governance of their applications and services. WSO2 today announced several new capabilities to address these demands with the latest release of the award-winning 100% open source WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware platform.

WSO2 Carbon 4.2 is the industry’s first enterprise middleware platform designed from the core to run both on-premises and in the cloud. Today’s launch includes:

  • Version 4.2 of the WSO2 Carbon core framework delivers major enhancements, including support for Hazelcast, multi-profile deployment support—an industry first, and synchronous deployment of artifacts. All products in the fully componentized WSO2 Carbon platform inherit these capabilities.
  • WSO2 API Manager 1.5 features several enhancements for managing access and service levels through throttling and user access tokens.
  • WSO2 Governance Registry 4.6 enhances content management by adding support for the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification.

“In the era of the connected business, enterprises are expanding their IT ecosystems and employing new models of collaboration and monetization across customers, partners and employees,” said Paul Fremantle, WSO2 co-founder and CTO. “The launch of WSO2 Carbon 4.2, WSO2 API Manager 1.5, and WSO2 Governance 4.6 provide powerful, open solutions to support high performance, high availability, and high scalability across these mission-critical environments. Equally important, they support the broad range of content that drives businesses today, along with fine-tuned management of access and service-levels to optimize business models for greater competitive advantage.”

WSO2 also announced today the launch of WSO2 Enterprise Store, the first complete platform for managing and provisioning any type of digital asset—applications, APIs, gadgets, e-books and other resources—for the entire enterprise asset life cycle. As part of the WSO2 Carbon platform, the new product also inherits the functionality in WSO2 Carbon 4.2. (For more information, see the WSO2 Enterprise Store press release dated October 30, 2013.)

WSO2 Carbon 4.2 Expands Core Capabilities

WSO2 Carbon is the industry’s first fully componentized middleware platform for creating, running and managing composite applications and Web services within a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud environment. Built on the OSGi specification, WSO2 Carbon lets developers easily deploy and customize any of its WSO2 Carbon-based middleware products, and the 175-plus components on which they are comprised, providing greater flexibility and agility to meet changing enterprise demands.

The WSO2 Carbon core framework provides all WSO2 middleware products with a consistent set of enterprise-class management, security, clustering, logging, statistics, tracing, and other capabilities. The cloud-enabled WSO2 Carbon core lets IT professionals write an application once and then simply deploy it on the same middleware on-premise, on a PaaS, or in a hybrid environment. Additionally, the inherent multi-tenancy allows organizations to manage isolation between departments, partners or simply between separate development groups—whether deploying software as a service (SaaS) or running it directly on servers.

New capabilities in Version 4.2 of the WSO2 Carbon core include support for Hazelcast, multi-profile deployment support—an industry first, and synchronous deployment of artifacts.

Hazelcast Support – With Version 4.2, the WSO2 Carbon core adds new distributed caching and clustering implementations that are based on Hazelcast, the open source in-memory data grid that provides a clustering and highly scalable data distribution platform for Java. Hazelcast combines distributed data structures, distributed caching capabilities, elasticity, memcache support, and integration with Spring and Hibernate. These capabilities bring several benefits to enterprise deployments, including the ability to handle thousands of operations per second, prevent the loss of data after crashes, and dynamically scale as new servers are added. Complementing the Hazelcast-based distributed caching and clustering implementations is a new caching infrastructure available with WSO2 Carbon 4.2.

Multi-profile Deployment Support – WSO2 introduces an industry first with multi-profile deployment support, which helps IT organizations to improve their resource utilization. Now instead of running all the features of a product or platform, developers can select a “preferred profile,” which runs only the features specific to that profile along with common features that start up with the server. For example, an IT organization may decide to run just the API Store instead of the full WSO2 API Manager product. Selecting the API Store profile then starts only the frontend/backend features relevant to the API Store Web interface.

Synchronous Deployment of Artifacts – WSO2 Carbon 4.2 now enables synchronous deployment of Carbon Application (CApp) artifacts. The Carbon Application Deployer is a collection of different artifacts bundled to a single deployable component. When deploying a CApp on any WSO2 product, it directly deploys all the relevant artifacts for the product by programmatically calling the relevant artifact deployers. The deployment of the artifacts is synchronous while the artifact deployment is atomic. As a result, if the CApp is deployed successfully, the artifacts are guaranteed to have deployed successfully as well.

WSO2 API Manager 1.5 Enhances Access and Service-Level Options

Version 1.5 is the latest release of WSO2 API Manager, the first 100% open source API management product to combine easy, managed API access with full API governance and analysis. It also is the first API management product to let IT organizations set up their own Apple or Google Marketplace-like API Store where developers can easily subscribe to and consume APIs. Meanwhile it provides API publishers with complete API lifecycle governance—from creating to publishing, deprecating and retiring APIs—as well as analytics and metrics to support decision-making and enforce service-level agreement (SLA) policies.

In addition to the capabilities inherited with WSO2 Carbon 4.2, WSO2 API Manager 1.5 adds several enhancements for managing availability and access. With Version 1.5, publishers can restrict API access throttling tiers for some users in order to better monetize API usage. WSO2 API Manager 1.5 also supports API resource-level throttling, as well as the ability to add extra properties for each throttling tier level and display them in the API Store along with the subscription process.

Expanded token capabilities in WSO2 API Manager 1.5 allow publishers to renew application access tokens through the API Store, set a token validity period through the user interface (UI), and revoke access tokens using the revoke API if there is a security violation. Version 1.5 also supports the OAuth 2.0 Authorization Grant Type, as well as the ability to obtain an OAuth 2.0 access token from a SAML 2.0 Bearer assertion. Additionally, it provides the option to encrypt access tokens when they are stored.

Other key features available with WSO2 API Manager 1.5 include:

  • New Sandbox API Gateway – Users can maintain a sandbox API Gateway instance that is separate from the production environment.
  • New Custom Mediation Extensions – Developers can unleash the power of the mediation engine from the embedded WSO2 ESB directly from the publishing UI and extend the default request and response mediation flows.
  • New JSONMate Editor – Integrated with API Publisher, it enhances the user experience in modifying the JSON content of Swagger API definitions.
  • Ability to advertise an API to multiple stores, including non-WSO2 stores.
  • Enhanced HTTP/HTTPS Support – The UI now supports the ability to select either or both HTTP and HTTPS as the API’s endpoints at the time an API is created.

About WSO2

WSO2 is the lean enterprise middleware company. It delivers the only complete open source enterprise SOA middleware stack purpose-built as an integrated platform to support today’s heterogeneous enterprise environments—internally and in the cloud. WSO2’s service and support team is led by technical experts who have proven success in deploying enterprise SOAs and contribute to the technology standards that enable them. For more information, visit https://wso2.com, or check out the WSO2 community on the WSO2 Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and FriendFeed.