More than three years at Apache Software Foundation

I started my open source contribution three years ago in a day like today , that is on 01^st August 2004 . While at the University (at that time I was doing my final year project) Srinath Perera educated the power of open source and the ASF. And he also mentioned me about the Web services and Axis Mora project , in the meantime he told me the idea of developing Apache Axis2. So it was a good news for me and , Srinath motivated me to join LSF and to Axis2 project. And then Farhaan Mohideen and Sanjiva Weerawarana allowed me to join LSF and Axis2 project. So that opened a new door for my carrier, thank you Srinath , Sanjiva and Farhaan for your help and support.

In the same time frame Eran Chinthaka , Ajith Ranbahu , Chathura Herath and Jaliya Ekanayake joined LSF and start the working toward Axis2 project , like learning Web service related specifications Axis1 and etc..

20 days after I joined LSF Axis2 first F2F was held in Colombo , Sri Lanka and after that I stared to contribute to Axis2. At the initial stage Dims , Glen and Alek helped us a lot on applying our patches and answering our mails , and it took about two months to become as an Apache commiter. So I have contributed to Apache and specially to Axis2 project almost three years. In addition to Axis2 I was able to contribute to Syanapse , Axiom , XMLSchema , Rampart , and Sandesha as well.

We worked at LSF for about year and after that we all joined WSO2 when it started up , and joining WSO2 did not change the way I contribute to Apache, what only happened was move to new location from LSF to WSO2 . And I should thanks Dr Sanjiva for giving a great opportunity to work at WSO2.

When I looking back I have achieved more achievement than I expected

• Become as an Apache Commiter

• Become as a WS PMC member

• Become an Apache Member and

• Was able to participate four Apache conferences as a speaker.

• Was able to organize ApacheCon Asia 2006 with the help of Sri Lankan FOSS community.

So when considering the last three years it was very good and I really enjoyed working in an open source community like Apache, and I hope that I will be able to continue to do so. In this occasion I should not forget to thanks all the WSO2 members , they also have helped me a lot in past two years.

WSO2 WSAS (Web Service Application Server) 2.0 released

I am(was) involving with architecturing designing , implementing Axis2 a lot , therefore I believe that I have very good experience and understanding about Axis2. However when it come to WS-policy , WS-Reliable Messaging and WS-Security my knowledge on those area is not that rich . Therefore to get those working together and configure them using policy is a bit of challenge. That does not mean getting RM and security working in Axis2 is a difficult task but when it come to more complex scenarios it is a challenge.

In the meantime Web services are not only for programmers other people also should be able to use them. In that case it should be easy to deploy and invoke service with minimal time and minimal effect.

WSO2 WSAS is built on Axis2 and provide a numerous enhancement to Axis2. While doing so it has solved most of the configuration issues that we commonly faced when we use Axis2 in industrial level applications. WSAS has very nice user interface to configure Security , RM, Policy and many more very easily. In addition to that it has very cool features ,

• Data service support : Provide a way to talk to Relational data base or publish a RDB as a Web service

• Expose EJB as web Service

• Deploy Axis1 service in Axis2

• Eclipse IDE integration

• Easy way to deploy POJO (annotated and non-annotated)

• Change Axis2 configuration at the runtime and made the changes with ought shutting down the server.

• Clustering support

• On the fly code generation

• Many enhancements to Security and RM (Sandesha2)

• RSS and Atom feed generation

• And many more .....

Other advantage we get when using WSAS is it has compatible versions of security , RM , XMLSchema Axiom and ect , so we do not need to worry about any compatible issues when we use WSAS , and we do not need to download them separately. Once we download WSAS we have everything , then just a matter of engaging the modules and use as we wish.

WSAS comes with standalone version as well as servelt version and it has tested with all the commonly used platforms , Application servers and JDKs.

As a Axis2 developer I would recommend you to have a look at WSAS and see how easy to deploy and invoke services.

[ANN][Axis2] Axis2 1.3-RC1 release

I have upload Axis2 1.3 RC1 artifact into my apache home location [1] ,
please test and make sure all the JIRAs we marked as fixed are there in
the release , in addition to that if you find any issues with the
release please create a JIRA [2] , then we can fix that for next RC.
This release is based on the SVN version number of following projects.

Axiom  : - 553458
Neethi  : 553469
XML Schema : 553334

We have a number of major changes from 1.2 to 1.3 and most of them are
listed in  apache axis2 wiki [3]. We have fixed more about 350 JIRA
issues from 1.2 to 1.3 in addition to the following new feature additions  ;
- Clustering support
- Doc-lt/bare wsdl generation and run time support (RPC MRs can handle
doc-lit/ bare )
- Custom deployment support
- NIO transport integration

Our plan is to make Axis2 1.3 release as mush as stable and robust, so
please help us by reviewing this release candidate.


[1] : http://people.apache.org/~deepal/axis2/1.3-RC1/
[2] : https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AXIS2
[3] : http://wiki.apache.org/ws/FrontPage/Axis2/changesfrom1.2to1.3

All about Axis2 services.xml

I wrote a tutorial explaining all the available options in services.xml , and I hope that will help you to solve your doubts

See what it is

Need for WS specification for session management

SOA and Web services becoming the today's key topic in the computer industries. SOA becoming a revolution force in the industry. A number of companies and their applications are converting into Web service applications , then they do not need to worry about the platform dependent issues and converting into Web service application they gain numerous benefits.

When moving into Web services , specially complicated application ,lifecycle and session management can be considered as one of the key requirement. However there is no WS specification on managing session. Therefore different Web service stack has its own session management support. They can not inter operate with each others , that can be considered as one of the key issue in the Web service session management.

When considering Apache stack; in Axis1 x it uses a separate SOAP headers to manage session , in Axis2 it uses a references parameter in WS-addressing header called “ServiceGroupId” as the session management mechanisms. As a result of not having specification, even Apache Axis1 and Apache Axis2 can not inteoperate each other , so I doubt whether they can inteoperate with other Web service stacks.

We have specification for Addressing , Reliable Messaging , Security and etc etc , so why not we introduce specification for WS session management. I personally think this is the right time to think about that and come up with Web service specification for session management (WS-SM), then we can assure that we have inteoperable way of managing sessions.