Planet WSO2

Open Source + "........" = Business Value

2008-09-07T04:09:18+00:00

If you take technology in general, by itself there is NO intrinsic value. This is a known fact. Unless technology is applied into a business scenario and achieves the set goals, there is no $$$$ value of it. It's just a bunch of code with a nice packaging around it :) Steve Jone's blog topic "SOA Success - value over technology" has a well detailed explanation into realizing the value of SOA

Zen poem

2008-09-06T21:25:13+00:00

To follow the path:
look to the master,
follow the master,
walk with the master,
see through the master,
become the master.

2008-09-06T20:00:00+00:00

Eran is learning Mach-II. Seems it is almost similar to Struts or any other framework, except that everywhere it is XML.

2008-09-06T20:00:00+00:00

2008-09-06T19:41:00+00:00

is learning Mach-II. Seems it is almost similar to Struts or any other framework, except that everywhere it is XML

2008-09-06T18:21:00+00:00

is testing Ping.fm by posting status messages thru Yahoo bot !!

Very Good Primer on CFC (ColdFusion Components)

2008-09-06T15:02:00+00:00

Found this very good primer on CFC (ColdFusion Components). I guess this will help, if some wanna get a glimpse in to things inside cfm files.

Is AMQP on the way to providing real business interoperability?

2008-09-06T06:00:14+00:00

I found this interesting article on InfoQ, posted by Steven Robbins a couple of weeks back. It gathers several key points that are being discussed with respect to using AMQP as an MOM in real-world mission-critical business applications. It is an ongoing debate that AMQP supports only a subset of features addressed by XMPP. Also the fact that AMQP does not address guaranteed delivery is also being questioned.

It is really nice to see WSO2 being mentioned among some software giants in this article.

Subscription lingo...get it right !

2008-09-06T03:27:07+00:00

As you may know WSO2 sells subscription to customers. In other words, we put our customers at ease by selling an insurance package committing to keeping that particular product trouble-free in production. Something goes wrong we'll fix it for you! Now there are certain terminologies that we follow (for that matter any company that provides enterprise support) in explaining what are the services

Git - Give it a Try

2008-09-05T19:17:27+00:00

Git is an open-source distributed version control system which was designed and implemented targeting speed and efficiency.

Most of the times, your first Git experience may not be something you really like as you wont get the checkout->change->commit->update->change->commit->...routine that you used to have in a conventional version control system. Its different ... but in a way its really cool.

Every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server.

Git was originally written by Linus Torvalds the guy who initiated the development of the Linux kernel and later became the chief Architect of the Linux operating system.

FireFox keeps moving - someone mentioned Chrome?

2008-09-05T19:11:51+00:00

Many people (myself included) and news organizations have been writing about Google's new Chrome browser - I for one can't even test it since I run OSX. Luckily for us, the guys over @ Mozilla haven't stopped their hectic pace of release for FireFox. The latest Alpha for the 3.1 release promises some pretty exciting and interesting features. Check it out here.

For all the 'promise' and hype surrounding Chrome, i doubt they could release anything to compell me to move from FireFox fulltime. The AdBlock Plus addon (I haven't seen ad's in 18 months now i think) makes my web surfing painless without the silly banner ads distracting web pages. I use maybe 5 or 6 other addons which I find very useful. FireFox 2 was painfully slow compared to the new 3 platform. Performance might be the only reason I look at another browser in the near future.

If FireFox and the large community behind it keep plugging away and improving it like they seem to consistently do, I see no reason why FireFox can't reach even higher usage then IE.

Google New Browser .. Nice way to introduce a product.. Blogging via Comic Book

2008-09-05T15:30:12+00:00

Google on Google Chrome - comic book So Goole gonna dip in to the web bowsers field also. http://blogoscoped.com/google-chrome/

Invoking Mashups using JSON

2008-09-05T11:47:29+00:00

Mashups running on the WSO2 Mashup Server can be invoked in using various message formats. They are SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2, POX (Plain Old XML), REST, JSON, SOAP/POX over JMS, SOAP/POX over SMTP.

Here is how you can use JSON to invoke a simple Mashup. In this example I will be invoking the RESTSample running on mooshup.com. This simple sample sends the payload as JSON and receives the response as JSON as well.

// Providing optional annotations
invokePOSTWeather.inputTypes={"city" : "string", "weatherDetails" : "string"};
invokePOSTWeather.outputType="#raw";
function invokePOSTWeather(city, weatherDetails){
    var request = new WSRequest();
    var options = new Array();
    // Instracts the server that my request needs to be formatted as JSON
    options.HTTPInputSerialization = "application/json/badgerfish";
    var payload = <POSTWeather><city>{city}</city><weatherDetails>{weatherDetails}
</weatherDetails></POSTWeather>;
    var result;
    try {
        request.open(options,"http://mooshup.com/services/samples/RESTSample/", false);
        request.send(payload);
        result = request.responseE4X;
    } catch (e) {
        result = e.toString();
    }
    return result
}

If you were to use TCPMonitor to trace the messages you will be able to see the messages sent and received by the Server.

Here is the request sent out by this Mashup

{"POSTWeather":{"city":{"$":"col"},"weatherDetails":{"$":"10"}}}

And the response it received

{"ws:POSTWeatherResponse":{"@xmlns":{"ws":"http:\/\/services.mashup.wso2.org\/RESTSample?xsd"},"return":{"$":"col"}}}

Note : There are three main ways that you can get the response from WSRequest. There are response.responseText, response.responseXML and response.responseE4X. If you were to use these variants when the response if JSON they will act as follows,

response.responseText - Would return the JSON string as the response
response.responseXML - Would return the XML representation of the JSON string
response.responseE4X - Would return the E4X representation of the JSON string

Adding Persistence to Synapse

2008-09-05T10:37:00+00:00

Danushka has written an excellent article on using ActiveMQ to persist messages in transit through Synapse or the WSO2 ESB.

RedHat enters the Virtualization game

2008-09-05T06:59:20+00:00

RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 4, 2008--Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the acquisition of Qumranet, Inc. The acquisition includes Qumranet's virtualization solutions, including its KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) platform and SolidICE offering, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), which together present a comprehensive virtualization platform for enterprise customers. In addition, Qumranet's talented team of professionals that develop, test and support Qumranet solutions, and its leaders of the open source community KVM project, will join Red Hat.

Read the full press release here. According to industry sources, total value of the deal is $107 million in hard cash.

How to avoid OutofMemory error when building projects with Maven2

2008-09-05T04:51:37+00:00

You may have encountered outofMemory issues when building source with Maven2. This normally happens when Maven runs out of available system memory.
In such case you have to set MAVEN_OPTS environment variable to increase the available memory.

In Windows
Open a command prompt in which you build the source and enter the following options. (Change the memory size according to the amount of memory in your system)
SET MAVEN_OPTS=-Xmx1024m

In Linux
Open a shell and set the options as follows.
export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m"

MySQL founder Michael Widenius quits Sun

2008-09-04T20:16:43+00:00

The main author of the database engine (the M in LAMP) and founder of MySQL AB, which was recently acquired by Sun for $1 billion has called it a day. It is rumored that Brian Aker will take his place.

Data Services-1.0Beta - The latest member of WSO2 SOA middleware suite

2008-09-04T20:02:07+00:00

We have been working hard over the last few weeks to launch the newset addition to the WSO2's SOA middleware platform, WSO2 Data Services -1.0beta. Now you can download it and explore the power of web services with relational data, data stored in csv or Microsoft Excel files.

WSO2 Data Services provides a convenient and user-friendly mechanism to expose data as web services and utilize a lot of QOS features such as WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Security etc..

It consists of a management UI which allows you to create, deploy and invoke data services without writing a line of code. Also, Eclipse IDE plugin brings the Data servce functionality into Eclipse IDE in which you can configure data services very easily.

There are lot more things you can do with this new product and some of the helpful references were already published. You may begin with quick start guide.

Stay tuned. This blog will be updated with many how-tos on WSO2 data services soon.

Games Convention 2008 - GC 2008: Booth Babes of Leipzig

2008-09-04T19:57:22+00:00

It's Friday and the weather is quite gloomy here in Colombo. Here's something to lift those spirits. I'm not a gamer. But you don't have to be one to appreciate this ;)

Games Convention 2008 - GC 2008: Booth Babes of Leipzig | Girls | SPIKE.com

Raaksha

2008-09-04T19:56:48+00:00

... is the name of the latest outfit where my friend suranjay is the lead vocalist. All you headbangers will get to see them (and a few others) soon in a gig near you. The venue isn't finalized yet, but I will keep you updated ...

Chrome gets a techie testing

2008-09-04T14:42:55+00:00

According to Google Analytics, 13.64% of all the visitors to my blog for the past day used Chrome. That is about four times the average. So my assumption is that the techie crowd are giving Chrome a good road test. I think it will be interesting to try again in a week or two, and see if Chrome is winning hearts, or whether people head back to Firefox.

WSO2 WSF-Spring 1.5 Released

2008-09-04T09:09:00+00:00

WSO2 WSF-Spring team is pleased to announce the availability of WSO2 Web Services Framework for Spring 1.5 version.

You can download the source and binary distributions from the following URL.
Project's website - downloads : http://wso2.org/downloads/wsf/spring

Pleas feel free to send any feedback to our forum
http://wso2.org/forum/462

or our mailing lists
http://wso2.org/mail#wsfspring

For further details please visit our project's website at:
http://wso2.org/projects/wsf/spring

Thank you very much for your interest in our products !!

WSO2 WSF-Spring Team

Axis2 Popularity Exponentially Increasing

2008-09-04T06:35:50+00:00

Apache Axis2 is a middleware platform which enables hosting of Web service applications and supports some of the major Web services standards.

The popularity of Apache Axis2 has been increasing over the years. It has come a long way since its 1.0 release in early 2006. It is somewhat becoming the de-facto standard Java Web services framework. In this article, we will analyze the popularity of Axis2, in terms of the number of downloads, as well as other important aspects of a successful open source project, such as community, stability & continuous evolution.

Downloads

Figure 1: Axis2 Monthly Downloads

Figure 1 shows the exponential growth in Axis2 downloads. The popularity of Axis2 continues to increase which indicates that the adoption of Axis2 is increasing. This also means that more and more companies are putting Axis2 into production. Note that the downloads graphs and figures indicate the downloads only from the main server at Apache Software Foundation. There are several mirrors around the world which host Axis2 release artifacts, and contribute to thousands of downloads per month each. Hence the real download figures are much higher.

Mailing List Activity & User Community

Figure 2: Axis2 mailing list activity

User activity on the mailing lists can be seen here. The user activity has steadily increased, peaking in March 2007, it has declined a bit thereafter & now has stabilized. This is one of the characteristics of a healthy & popular open source project. In the beginning, there are not much resources available about the project, but there is a lot of interest. Hence, there is lots of activity on the mailing lists. When the project reaches maturity, it is much more easier for the users to figure out things and find relevant resources, hence there is a decline on the mailing list activity. Some open source projects reach maturity, but then simply fade away because nothing new takes place & the community gradually drifts away from the project. A healthy project keeps evolving at a steady pace, which is indicated by the steady traffic on the lists. Axis2 has also a healthy & growing community. If you look at the mailing list archives, it shows that most of the users have started to get actively involved in the discussions & help fellow users, which are indications of a very successful open source project.

Project Page Views

Figure 3: Axis2 Project Page Views

Figure 3, shows the page views related to the Axis2 project. Again, this shows that more people are coming to the project Website, which indicates increasing popularity. The above graph does not show the visits to the OxygenTank, the Developer Portal for SOA, which hosts a large number of articles on Axis2. The forums on the OxygenTank also show increasing interest on Axis2 & related projects. The increase in page & article views is correlated with the decrease in the user queries on the mailing lists. There are more resources available out there for Axis2 users to figure out things by themselves, before having to resort to asking for help on the mailing lists. In fact, the mailing list archives contains a wealth of information, and this information is indexed by popular search engines. Hence users can simply do some searching on Google and find out how to do various things with Axis2 or find solutions to problems they face.

Contribution to Apache Axis2 from WSO2
The majority of the contribution towards Apache Axis2 & other leading Apache Web Services projects such as Apache Rampart, Apache Sandesha2, Apache Neethi and many more, was by WSO2. Some of these contributors are now pursuing their higher studies at leading Universities. However, there are several other major companies which are also actively involved in this project. This is another sign of a successful & truly open-source project.

WSO2 WSAS & Axis2
WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS), the award winning enterprise ready version of Axis2, integrates this popular Web services framework, and in addition, provides security integration through Apache Rampart, Reliability through Apache Sandesha2, high availability & scalability, a user friendly management console & much more. It is also released under the Apache Software License. The robustness of the Axis2 core in WSAS has been proven by battle testing it in real-world enterprise setups. If you are interested in how Axis2 & WSAS can fit into your enterprise, read this article on the WSO2 WSAS blog.

Conclusion
The popularity of Axis2 is rapidly increasing. Axis2 is a mature & stable project. It has a healthy user community. It also keeps evolving to cater to changes in the technology landscape & user requirements.

Resources
1. Axis2 Statistics Page.
2. Axis2 1.4.1 Release (Latest release at the time of writing)
3. Axis2 Mailing List Archives

WSO2 Team....Smiling Away !

2008-09-04T05:23:01+00:00

On my way to office today, I heard on the radio the 10 best and worst fake smiles. Topping the chart for the best fake smile was Julia Roberts and worst was Posh spice (Victoria Beckham). This got me thinking, who's our best fake smile ? I'll give you the honor to decided. Only problem is, all these smiles are genuine... I know cos I was there when these were taken !.....well most of 'em at

Chrome 4 Geeks

2008-09-04T03:20:15+00:00

If you are reading this on Chrome, try this link: about:memory

Google The KILLER

2008-09-04T01:54:00+00:00

Google killed Firefox. No I am not going to write "Google is going to kill Firefox" because the very moment Google announced Chrome, Firefox died.

So many people love Google, including all those who hate Microsoft as the evil force. However, more than Microsoft, Google kills open source, and the murder of Firefox is a prime example.

Open source folks would jump up and question, what the hell Microsoft was doing at OSCON?. But how many are questioning, what the hell Google did to Firefox?

If anyone argues, that it is not only Firefox, but also IE that is going to be killed, I doubt that. Firefox is not a company, it is an open source project that is funded by companies, like Google. Now that Google has competing interests to those of Firefox, no one knows what would happen to those funding, irrespective of agreements. IE is backed by a Giant company, and they will have enough money to invest in best brains and keep on competing with Chrome.

Web developers now worry that they now have yet another browser to support. Soon it will come down to two, IE and Chrome, and of course different versions of those.

RIP Firefox.

REST-* begins to take shape

2008-09-04T02:14:38+00:00

See: AtomPub Multipart Media Resource Creation! Basically how to do SwA or MTOM type stuff with Atom.

Ah Tim, better start printing these out so that you can count the pages when REST-* is all said and done.

Sigh. Its really too bad that we are now going to re-invent it all around Atom.

Google's Chrome comic, Stripped

2008-09-04T01:53:24+00:00

One thought I had when reading the first ten or so pages of Google's Chrome Comic is "This is one boring, longass comic with way too much jargon." I stopped reading half way through and thought I'll read the rest once they decide to put out a version for Linux.

Incidentally, the sentiment is shared by those at portfolio.com and 4chan as well.

Google Chrome - Fast and Elegant

2008-09-04T00:19:48+00:00

I had couple of issues with IE and FF3 in Windows and I decided to give it a try with the Buzz: Google Chrome. Amazingly, it's pretty fast than I expected. The next thing I like about chrome is it's simplicity, no stupid buttons hanging all over your browser :).

I like the concept of having processes for each tab. I am wondering that browser technology is going to be much like the OSs. I mean the comic book is filled with many OS concepts I have learnt :).

Kudos to Chrome !!

Getting Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse working with Ubuntu 8.10

2008-09-03T21:59:00+00:00

Got a Microsoft Bluetooth mouse as a gift and didn't have time to set it up on my Ubuntu box. This is how I finally got it working.

(Pre-Conditions : Your bluetooth adapter/dongle should be working)

1. Fire up a terminal and type

hcitool scan

You should see something like
Scanning ...
00:1D:D8:92:59:F6 Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000

Copy the hardware address found above.

2. Go and edit hcid.conf

sudo gedit /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf

And put following at the end of that conf file.

device HardwareAddressHere {
name “Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000”;
}

3. Restart the bluetooth system with the config file.

sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart

You should see some thing like

* Restarting bluetooth [ OK ]

4. Now you need to pair the devices with the computer. Type

sudo hidd --search

You should see something like

Searching ...
    Connecting to device 00:1D:D8:92:59:F6

Done. Your mouse should be working now.

This was adapted from this post to suit my requirement.

Adding Persistence to Synapse - The Queuing Model

2008-09-03T22:03:52+00:00

In one of my previous posts I explained how we can add persistence to Apache Synapse. Please go through the following article for an elaboration of how you go about doing this.

Article on WSO2 OxygenTank - Adding Persistence to Apache Synapse - The Queuing Model

Chrome

2008-09-03T14:30:38+00:00

So, yeah, google browser. For me the most compelling UI change is the tabs on top of addressbar. Had some tabs open and after switching between each other I'm feeling almost tired of the way it's in Firefox/Opera/IE. That's brilliance. The other brilliant idea is processes. It's one of those ...

Sending IM messages via MSN using the WSO2 Mashup Server

2008-09-03T15:22:59+00:00

[Note: also published on the Mooshup.com blog.]

If you try to send IM messages using a windows live account you may encounter the error reported in the JIRA MASHUP-1087. The reason for this is that the library we use to send IM messages via MSN (jml) is outdated. A newer version of this library was released on the 5th of August 2008 and is available here.

In order to get this working you need to download the 1.0b3 version of jml and drop it into the lib/patches folder of the WSO2 Mashup Server and restart it.

Here is a simple client for sending a IM message via MSN,

function IMExample(){
var im = new IM("msn");
im.login("username@live.com","password");
im.sendMessage("keithgchapman@hotmail.com","Hi, This was sent from the WSO2 Mashup Server!");
im.disconnect();
}

For more details on sending IM messages using the WSO2 Mashup Server please refer the "Sending Instant Messages via Mashup Server" article.

Java Strings: literal.equals(param) OR param.equals(literal)

2008-09-03T13:23:20+00:00

Comparing strings is bit tricky :) Say for an example you want to test a String reference against the literal "hello". In simple terms you have a String (say helloStr) and you want to see if the content of that is equals to "hello". You have two choices here,

1. helloStr.equals("hello")

2. "hello".equals(helloStr)

Both will do fine, but which is the better one? I've been using the second form but never thought of the difference (hmm, that's bad ;) anyway people do remember certain things bit later). In one of the code reviews at WSO2 it was revealed. The first form can lead to a Null pointer exception in the case when the helloStr is null. The second option will save you from this since the literal "hello" is not null always and you are invoking a method of a not null object. In this case even if the helloStr is actually null it doesn't matter because it'll only cause the program to check "hello" against null which results false.

If you are checking two String references then you have no option, but always try to invoke the equals() from the most probably not null reference.

Little things do matter :)

google launches Chrome browser

2008-09-03T07:12:43+00:00

Google has just launched a new, Open Source browser they're calling Chrome. According to google, this earlye Beta is only for Windows, with a Mac and Linux release to come shortly. Unfortunately since I only have Macs or linux boxes, I can't test it. Send me your feedback once you've had a chance to take it for a spin.

According to google:

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.

I like the idea of each tab having it's own isolated sandbox vm and memory - sounds like a grea idea. Can't wait to try it out.

Update - someone out there of course ran some performance tests (JavaScript) comparing IE, FireFox and Chrome. Read the results and run your own tests here. Chrome clearly is superior on the performance side.

How to Access MySQL Database fom the Remote Location using Command Line

2008-09-03T05:17:16+00:00

The is the way to access MySQL Database from the remote location using command line.

Before you access database from the remote location, you have to grant the permission to access database . (See How to Grant Permission )

then from remote location use following command

Syntax : mysql -h [IP Address of MySQL DB] -u [UserName] -p

IP Address of MySQL DB = IP Address of MySQL Server Machine

UserName = Username which granted in MySQL Server

Ex : mysql -h 10.100.1.42 -u chamara -p

When you enter above command MySQL Server will ask Password.you have to submit password which you enter in granting permission phase.

Enabling users in Open Source Products

2008-09-03T04:24:18+00:00

This sounds like a dull topic doesn't it ? :) What I'd like to relate to are the users who have the potential of becoming a paid customer. The advantage for open source software over proprietary software, is the fact that you can learn everything about it starting from the source code. This inevitably gives the user the confidence in knowing the strengths/weaknesses/applicability of the

Google Chrome - First Impressions

2008-09-03T02:31:00+00:00

Just tried Google Chrome. Looks cool and I definitely love the functionality of dragging tabs to create new windows. From the looks of it (taskmanager) it seems to spawn a new process only if the tab is made into a new window.

1. I love the interface. Simple and elegant and a whole lot of area to view the pages without obstruction.

2. CSS confirmity seems to be good. In fact I doubt whether they used the mozilla components for CSS since it seems to work exactly the same as FF3.

3. Most visited tab is cool and pretty much useful when you start the day :)

There are some glitches though

1. No Linux version ! This means I'll be sticking to FF for 90% of the time. [ I understand the mindset of giving the first place to Windows users (there a whole lot of them) But why not even a simple alpha/pre-alpha on Linux and Mac ? ]

2. Its noticeably slow. FF3 is blazingly fast (perhaps I am used to it too much) but loading of javascript and certain flash plugins seems really slow compared to FF3. There are visible glithches in rendering plain html pages. This is somewhat conflicting because there are reports that say its javascript rendering is really fast! My connection is working fine and I have no clue why it seems surprisingly slow to me.

3. Single box for search and url is a double edged sword. It makes the interface simple but the usage somewhat tricky. For example I am used to type just google in the address bar (in FF) and hit enter to go to Google. In chrome it searches Google for 'google' and displays the results.

I'm sure Google will soon fix these (except for the Linux release. I'm not sure whether Google will take the trouble to release a version for the handful of (?) Linux users out there. For example there is no equivalent to gmail notifier in Linux officially released by Google to date. There is a third party one but its another frustrated geek doing his own handy work). We know at least M$ is scared so let us see what others have to say ;)

Yet Another Web Browser!

2008-09-03T02:05:58+00:00

The title of this post may have been, "Yet Another Web Browser :( " or it could have even been "Yet Another Web Browser?" ... then again...

Google recently announced the launch of its Web browser named Chrome. Only the Windows version will be available initially. This leads to an interesting question for those of us who design & develop rich browser UIs. Cross-browser compatibility issues have been many a developer's nightmare. Supporting multiple versions of the two major browsers; Internet Explorer & Firefox itself is currently a big challenge. There are toolkits that promise to take care of cross-browser compatibility issues, but none of those have fully lived up to their promises. Now to add to the agony, developers may have to make sure that their UIs work on Google Chrome as well; that is if Chrome turns out to be popular amongst the masses,

All the major open source SOA middleware products from WSO2 provide rich management consoles. If Chrome becomes popular, we may need to put in some extra effort to make sure that Chrome users can seamlessly use WSO2 product managment consoles.

Anyway, this is a nice little cartoon presentation that explains the new concepts being introduced & issues being addressed by Google Chrome. It looks like Chrome has also borrowed several cool concepts from other browsers such as Opera & Firefox, while introducing another set of novel concepts. Each tab running as a separate process sounds exciting.

Downloading Google Chrome from Mozilla FireFox

2008-09-03T01:04:00+00:00

Yesterday I heard the news about Google Chrome and then I wrote a blog about that. Today I download the Googles's latest application , which is Google Chrome using FireFox. So is is fun , when I want to switch to FireFox what I did was download FireFox from IE and then switch to that. Today I did the same thing , I download the Google Chrome and publish this blog using that.

First impression is very good and I can even see that perform very well , congratulation thank you very much to Google team for doing such a great thing.

One more browser to test against!

2008-09-02T19:34:50+00:00

Browser compatibility issues are annoying. You cannot guarantee an application behaves similarly in all popular browsers without repeating the same set of tests in each of them. It is a headache!
To make the things worst for developers as well as testers, yet another browser has been added to the list.

Google recently announced the launch of their open source browser called Chrome. So, we now have one more browser to make our applications compatible with. Applications need to be designed in a way so that they work properly in all major browsers. Testers need to put some extra effort to make sure cross-browser issues are minimum. Also, UI automation tool kits should be made compatible with this new browser.

Google has released the beta on Windows first. Lets see what difference will this new browser make.

Apache Axis2 1.4.1 Released

2008-09-02T17:28:18+00:00

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".

WSO2 Tools' SOA Governance Support on the Rise

2008-09-02T13:29:00+00:00

First came the article on design time governance with Registry. Then came the article on persistence for run time governance with ESB.

WSO2 SOA enabling tools are constantly evolving.

blogging constellations

2008-09-02T11:35:41+00:00

Jonathan Marsh of WSO2 just posted a mashup that as he describes it

provides a visualization of a set of feeds
providing an intuitive sense of activity in a set of blogs
frequency and size of posts,
cross-links between the feeds
highlighting links to "domains of interest"

WSO2 Mashup server is the latest product in our SOA stack allowing you to create, compose, and connect your SOA artifacts.

Check out the Mashup here, and try adding your set of blogs to see how they all relate and reference one another.

Murali from Moratuwa

2008-09-02T06:56:00+00:00

The University of Moratuwa, SL, where I studied as an undergrad, is on news for it's proud product of "Murali", which is nothing but an eight legged robot for detecting land mines.
North-Eastern regions of Sri Lanka are one of the heavily mined areas in the world due to the war between SL government and Tigers. The war has come to a decisive stage as government is gaining control over many regions, but land mines can be a problem for years even after the war. Therefore, this kind of a product from Sri Lankan institute should be appreciated and supported.
The most important characteristic of Murali is its ability to access areas that cannot be accessed by other means. Also Murali is capable of collaborating with other Muralis operated in a particular area upon detection of a land mine.
Read more...

Murali, or the Moratuwa University Robot for Anti-Landmine Intelligence, is a result of project funded by National Science Foundation and efforts of students lead by Dr. Thrishantha Nanayakkara.

Watch video ...

PS: Sorry if I raised eyebrows of few cricket addicts with the title.

Federated registries and crawlers

2008-09-02T04:40:00+00:00

Deepal has revealed some of the things we discussed over the chat during the last weekend regarding web services discovery mechanisms.
I started to look into WSO2 registry to help with another PhD student but didn’t have much time to dig into the architecture level as I was busy during last week with my studies.
Yeah… the problem with having multiple registries in a heterogeneous environment is that it makes really difficult to find web services information, which is essential part in SOA. As web services grows from hundreds to thousands, the consumers or the clients need to have an efficient way to locate them. And publishers also need to attract clients without going through other marketing channels and gimmicks.
One such approach is discussed in this paper, which uses a crawler engine to find web services. In this approach the Crawler Engine (WSCE) actively crawls excising UBRs and search engines to collect web services information. Thus a system can maintain most up-to-date information about available web services. Web services information can be found using existing web services registries and web services portals. And also via search engines, which is becoming popular.

[Source : Eyhab, A.-M. and H.M. Qusay, Investigating web services on the world wide web, in Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web. 2008, ACM: Beijing, China]

But using search engines too have limitations as they do not recognize web services with basic service properties such as binding information, ports, operations etc. And search engines can cache/store WSDL documents but there is no business-centric model or adhering to web services standards.

Another approach discussed in this paper is to form a federation of registries. The current search facilities offered by the latest version of UDDI do not offer any special features for finding Web service registries depending on the business domains. And it is difficult to have a design and execution autonomy for affiliated registries. The approach discusses in the paper allows peer to peer network of private, semi-private and public UDDI registries, which allow transparent access to registries in a federated environment. Following are the essential features of the approach

-Participating registries are autonomous registries that can be private or public
-Participating registries can be part of multiple federations
-Participating registries can be heterogeneous. Can have different data models and APIs
-Participating registries can arbitrary join and leave the federation. This is something that we cannot achieve with the UDDI replication support in V3
-Participating registries will have the design and execution autonomy
-The federation of registries can be formed as a market place for common interests
-The XTRO or the extended registries ontology provides a way o do complex queries across federations

So, in overall there is a requirement of adhering to a common standards as well as developing mechanisms to retrieve web services information from the repositories built upon multiple standards. IMO the latter is much better as it does not limit to a particular standard. (Lessons from the history)

How to Retrieve data using MySQL in Java Console

2008-09-02T03:53:24+00:00

This is simple example of data retrieving from the MySQL Database using java code. For connecting mysql database from the java code, you have to add MySQL Connector jar file ( Download MySQL Connector ) in to your reference libraries.

Here's the sample Code....

public class ReadingMySQL

{

public static void main(String[] args)

{

          Connection conn = null;
           Statement stmt = null;
            ResultSet rs = null;

            try {
              String dbURL = "jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/wsasset";   // url of the mysql database
              String username = "root";    // username of wsasset database
              String password = "";    // password of wsasset database

Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver");

conn = DriverManager.getConnection(dbURL, username, password);

stmt = conn.createStatement();

if (stmt.execute("select * from assets"))

               {
                     rs = stmt.getResultSet();
                }

else

               {
                    System.err.println("select failed");
                }
               while (rs.next())

               {
                   String entry = rs.getString(2);
                   System.out.println(entry);
                   System.out.println(rs.getString(3));
                   System.out.println(rs.getString(4));
                   System.out.println(rs.getString(5));
                   System.out.println(rs.getString(6));
                   System.out.println(rs.getString(7));
               }

} catch (ClassNotFoundException ex)

             {
                  System.err.println("Failed to load mysql driver");
                   System.err.println(ex);
              }

       catch (SQLException ex) {
            System.out.println("SQLException: " + ex.getMessage());
            System.out.println("SQLState: " + ex.getSQLState());
            System.out.println("VendorError: " + ex.getErrorCode());
            }

       finally {
            if (rs != null) {
                try {
                    rs.close();
                } catch (SQLException ex) { /* ignore */ }
                rs = null;
            }
            if (stmt != null) {
                try {
                    stmt.close();
                } catch (SQLException ex) { /* ignore */ }
                stmt = null;
            }
            if (conn != null) {
                try {
                    conn.close();
                } catch (SQLException ex) { /* ignore */ }
                conn = null;
            }
        }
    }
}

SOA is NOT only about Legacy Integration

2008-09-02T01:45:00+00:00

There is an interesting article on CIO that discuss why startups should be serious about SOA. Often the SOA principles are thought of a way to get out of EAI hell, thus solving legacy integration problems. So what about new software systems that you build in startups? Should you care SOA?

Yes you should:

As I look into the future, I see a world of more business process outsourcing, more integration with both internal and external applications, more demand for business agility, and more mergers and acquisitions. As a startup, the information systems should be built with this future state in mind.

As a startup, what are the benefits of jumping into SOA early?

One of the biggest challenges that well established companies have with SOA is shifting gears from the "way we have always done it" to service-oriented methods.

So if a startup could adopt SOA early, there will be no effort required when you become established.

As the larger corporations struggle with large scale SOA initiatives, startups can make SOA part of their IT strategy from the inception and take a "built to change" approach to software development.

Google plans to launch Web browser

2008-09-02T00:21:00+00:00

Google is always doing cool thing and other thing is that whenever google does something good most of the people started to use that. a good example for those are
- YouTube
- Gamil
- Google groups
- Google maps
- Google Spread sheet

So today I got to know that Google is planing to introduce a new browser [Full Story] . I think that would be a cool idea , however the problem is will it be able to compete with FireFox. But I believe that Google can do that . Let's wait and see , anyway if google release a new browser then I will also download and try that.

I almost forgot to add the most interesting part , have a look at introduction to it using a comic strip.

US Open begins...

2008-09-01T23:50:17+00:00

Sigh, the final grand slam of the year..... My predictions for the 2008 US Open : - Men's single champion - Roger Federer Nadal is brilliant. He's fast, literally reaches EVERY ball that gets returned to him...... BUT doesn't have the technical diversity that Roger has. If Roger exploits this and goes for the winners instead of playing it safe, he can easily beat Nadal. Looking at Rogers

Quickstart Apache Axis2 Book

2008-09-01T21:36:32+00:00

Today I received my copy of the book Quickstart Apache Axis2. This is one of the first books on Apache Axis2 by one of the pioneering members from the Axis2 team, Deepal Jayasinghe.

About the Author
Deepal is a prolific contributor to Apache Axis2 as well as several other projects at Apache Software Foundation, in addition to several open source SOA projects at WSO2 such as WSO2 WSAS, WSO2 Registry and many more. He worked as a Tehnical Lead at WSO2. Currently he is pursuing his graduate studies at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also an Apache Member, Apache Web Services Project Management Committee (PMC) member, as well as an Apache committer.

About the Book
It is a well structured and well written book, which is suitable for any Axis2 & Web services novice, as well as a good reference even for the experts. Everything is explained to the point, and hence is very easy to read or refer later on. It comes with several practical examples which can be tried out by the reader to get a better understanding of the material. All the relevant code can be downloaded from http://www.packtpub.com/files/code/2868_Code.zip. It certainly will be a valuable addition to my library.

Web Service Discovery using Search engines

2008-09-01T17:44:00+00:00

Few days back Kaushalye and I had a chat about features of WSO2 registry as well as supported standards. One of the reason behind the discussion was that he is doing a research on UDDI and nowadays registry like WSO2 registry. One of the issues with nowadays registry is that they do not follow an open standards , so that causes to number of issues when it come to federation and interoperability. If we just think about something like UDDI registry they are inteoperable and follow a common standards. Yes , I agree UDDI is somew hat complex and because of that not many people use UDDI in there applications. That is one of the main reason behind WSO2 registry , Mule Galaxy etc..

On the other hand if we take WSO2 registry for example , though it does not follow any particular standard for a SOA registry , which provides a way to interact with others. Which is ATOM or APP, anyone can build an application to interact with multiple WSO2 registries. So we can solve the problem of federation issues using APP. However that only among a set of WSO2 registry instances , then the problem is how can we federate and service discovery among registries from different vendors.

Let's forget about all those and focus on what I need to discuss here. The idea behind SOA registry is to

Register SOA artifacts like Web services
Mange artifacts
Discover them
Invoke them

If you look at UDDI registry , that exactly what it does.

When I read some of the articles and papers in the internet (Thank Kaushalye for the links) , I found most of the commonly used search engine (Google , Yahoo etc) can be used to Web service discovery. Those search engines knows how to talk to UDDI registries and get the data from there. I too agree that it is good if we can use search engines for Web service discovery purposes ,rather than building new applications for that .

If we look at most of the registries , they are isolated, meaning no connection with each other. So applications like Google can not find them. Then it is very difficult to do the service discovery. Therefore it is always good idea to have something like central registry. Then search engines can communicate with them and do the Web service discovery.

Therefore I think it is good if we can come up with open standard for SOA registry (of cource which should be which is much simpler than UDDI ) . And then build Crawler to talk to those registries and do the service discovery.

http://www2008.org/papers/pdf/p795-almasriA.pdf
http://www.webservicesarchitect.com/content/articles/siddiqui01.asp

Adding Persistence to Synapse - The Queuing Model

2008-09-01T15:36:00+00:00

There is a new addition to the list of items in the ESB tutorial. Danushka has written an article on adding persistence to Apache Synapse using a queuing model.

The summary of this article is:

Apache Synapse is designed to be a simple, lightweight and a high performance Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and supports a number of functions out-of-the-box. But Synapse does not have any mechanism to support message persistence within it and hence one might hesitate to use it in his mission-critical application amidst its rich set of features. But we can add persistence to Synapse easily by using its JMS transport, a JMS provider and a combination of two proxy services (say Proxy1 and Proxy2). Proxy1 dumps all the incoming messages in a JMS queue and Proxy2 reads messages off that queue and pump them through its mediator chain. We get a JMS provider that supports persistence so that our JMS queue handles message persistence. Here ActiveMQ is our preferred JMS provider. Not only does ActiveMQ support persistence, it also supports creating embedded brokers so that Synapse can talk to the ActiveMQ broker through an in-memory communication channel.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Service Health Dashboard

2008-09-01T16:06:40+00:00

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has recently incorporated a health dashboard, which displays the health of the various AWS services. This is a very important feature since some of these services, especially Amazon S3, failed a couple of times recently with a downtime of several hours. The most important thing is that you can register to the RSS feeds of these different services and get notified when failures occur, performance degradation occurs or when the services come back to life. This would provide somewhat of an incentive for companies which are reluctant to host their systems on Amazon's infrastructure using Amazon We Services.

To take this one step further, it would be good if SMS, Pager & Email alerts can be provided when services fail. This will alert the interested parties much quicker.

This would also be very helpful for companies deploying WSO2's Open Source SOA products in an autoscaling configuration [1] on Amazon EC2. [1] is in early draft status, and shows how Apache Axis2 & WSO2 WSAS Web services can be autoscaled on Amazon EC2. The same concept can be adopted for other products as well.

1. Autoscaling Axis2 Web Services on Amazon EC2

What is Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC)

2008-09-01T12:24:15+00:00

Software Testing is most important task in software development.Once you developing a software Application,you have to understand the software development life cycle.like wise Software Testing Life Cycle is also parallel goes with the Software Development life Cycle.

Now I am going to explain section by section of Software Testing Life Cycle.

1. Requirement Analysis

In Requirement analysis phase need to understand of all the software requirements.for this you can use Software Requirement Specification (SRS) Document.

2. Test Case Writing

In this phase you have to write test cases by covering all the features and functionality in application.

Test Case Document should contain following sections.

Test Case Name :- Name Of the Test Case (Ex : Click Ok Button)
Test Case :- How that test should do (Ex: Go to X window and Left Click Ok Button)
Expected Result : - Result Of the Test (Ex : Y window Display)
Status : - Actual Result of test case Pass/Fail
Comments : - Special Remarks of the test case.

3. Test Case Executing

Executing test cases in test case Document and filling.

4. Issue Reporting

During the application testing you have to track all the issues currently having.for this you can use issue tracking tool.

5.Issue Verification

After fix the issue you reported by the developer you have to retest that.above 3,4,5 STLC phases you have to follow as a cycle until application come up to some standard.

6. Release Product

In this phase you are ready to release the application.you have to make release notes for it.In release not contain all the areas you tested and what are the knows issues in this release application.

Immortal Beloved ...

2008-09-01T10:45:37+00:00

Good morning, on July 7
Though still in bed, my thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Beloved, now and then joyfully, then sadly, waiting to learn whether or not fate will hear us - I can live only wholly with you or not at all - Yes, I am resolved to wander so long away from you until I can fly to your arms and say that I am really at home with you, and can send my soul enwrapped in you into the land of spirits - Yes, unhappily it must be so - You will be the more contained since you know my fidelity to you. No one else can ever possess my heart - never - never - Oh God, why must one be parted from one whom one so loves. And yet my life in V is now a wretched life - Your love makes me at once the happiest and the unhappiest of men - At my age I need a steady, quiet life - can that be so in our connection? My angel, I have just been told that the mailcoach goes every day - therefore I must close at once so that you may receive the letter at once - Be calm, only by a calm consideration of our existence can we achieve our purpose to live together - Be calm - love me - today - yesterday - what tearful longings for you - you - you - my life - my all - farewell. Oh continue to love me - never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved.
ever thine
ever mine
ever ours

The last letter from a set of three, found in the the desk of Ludwig van Beethoven after his death in 1827. The letters are said to be written to one Antonie Brentano whom he met in 1810, married to a merchant 15 years her senior since 1798 and living in Frankfurt, until her Fathers illness brought them to Vienna.

These letters were written around the end of 1812 when it was evident that she would be leaving Vienna, after which Beethoven never met her ...

As is usually the case with such intriguing tales about our beloved personalities, a movie was made in 1994 based on the letters and the search for their recipient.