WSO2 Upgrades SOA Components - Mitchell Pronschinske, DZone

Today WSO2, an open source SOA and cloud services company, launched new versions of several SOA components, including the Business Process Server, Data Services Server, Business Activity Monitor, Gadget Server, and Mashup Server. The components all run on the WSO2 Carbon 3.0 platform, which is a fully modular middleware platform. Today's releases all have the functionality of the Carbon 3.0 platform, which was released in May. All of WSO2's software is free under the Apache Software License.

The BPS helps developers orchestrate business processes with WS-BPEL, and now version 2.0 adds support for the BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask specifications, which are currently under review by OASIS. BPEL4People extends BPEL for the orchestration of role-based human activities in addition to the existing support for web services. WS-HumanTask defines human tasks, their properties, behavior, and options. Other features include:

• Scheduled instance cleanup: users can schedule a task to clean both completed and failed instances within production environments.
• Java Message Service (JVM) API support: external services can be invoked through JMS transport.
• XML Path extension support: users can write their own extensions using the XML Path Language and deploy them in the WSO2 BPS.

DSS enables database administrators and developers to create and manage REST resources and WS*-style web services. New features include:

• Contract-first data service creation: developers start with XML schema and WSDL definitions to create their data services; now developers have the flexibility to choose between a data-first or contract-first service creation model.
• Batch mode for insert, update and delete operations: administrators can schedule regular updates of data services that do not require real-time operation.
• Boxcarring support: developers now "boxcar" a number of service requests into a single database transaction.
• Data validation logic: allows automatic checking to confirm that data being input is correct, meaningful, and meets security requirements.
• Support for additional data types: includes array, binary input/output, and Carbon data sources.

The BAM enables real-time visibility into SOA processes, workflows, and transactions. These are the new features:

• Added Support: For Oracle RDBMS, deployment on JBoss, Tomcat, and WebLogic servers.
• Error Category Monitoring: new monitoring feature for ESB mediation data.
• Other improvements: enhancements to analytics summary calculations, storage, and visualization.

The Gadget server allows quick implementation and modification of OpenSocial-based gadgets and web-based portals. New features include:

• Inter-gadget communication support: a new publish/subscribe mechanism allows users to write gadgets that communicate with each other.

• Gadget editor: Gadgets stored in the registry can be edited using the new browser-based editor.
• Support for i18n: allows users to write gadgets that support any international language and are supported by the gadget container.

The Mashup Server now makes it easier to share mashups. You can now upload a mashup together with all the required resources in a ZIP file. There is also a new user-based mashup deployment model and a scheduled task management UI for recurrent mashups.

You can download all the WSO2 SOA components on https://wso2.com/