This is how I see my world

Yet another success story of Apache Axis2

2011-07-26T17:31:00.000-07:00

Axis2 is one of the very successful Apache projects in many different ways; however I am not going to discuss the quality of the project of customers who use the project, rather a totally different area of its success.

Axis2 was started with six core members (all from Sri Lanka) and later joined many members to the project. The most interesting and notable thing about Axis2 is all the initial members entered graduated school and four of them have already become PhD holders (Srinath, Jaliya, Chinthaka and Chathura). Not stropping from that second, third, and forth (may be fifth) generations of contributors have entered graduate school and are now in the pipeline to complete their Ph.D.'s in the next few years (at least 12).

Counting all, in the history of Apache software foundation Axis2 will be the first project to produce so many PhD holders. I think this is a huge success of the project, and many credits should go to Sanjiva for motivating all of them to select the correct path.

Variations in Performance and Scalability when Migrating n-Tier Applications to Different Clouds

2011-07-13T17:38:00.000-07:00

Variations in Performance and Scalability when Migrating n-Tier Applications to Different Clouds

View more presentations from deepalk

You can find the paper:-http://deepal.org/

A new book on Apache Axis2

2011-02-23T17:27:00.000-08:00

Happily, we were able to publish the second book on Apache Axis2. I published the first book in 2008 (Quickstart Apache Axis2), and after three years, now the second book is also available (Apache Axis2 Web Services). Our initial plan was to publish the book this time last year, but due to usual reasons it got delayed. We have improved the book a lot and added lot of new and interesting contents.
I really want to thank my co-author Afkham Azeez, who helped me a lot to add new chapters and to make the book ready for building advanced web services with Axis2. We started Axis2 in way back 2004, and needless to say this project will not exists without the initial members and their tremendous contributions: Srinath Perera, Ajith Ranabahu, Eran Chinthaka, Davanum Srinivas, Glen Daniels, Sanjiva Weerawarana, Paul Fremantle, Jaliya Ekanayake, Chathura Herath, Ruchith Fernando, and Chamikara Jayalath. In addition, special thanks goes to our second generation contributors: Thilina Gunarathne, Keith Chapman, Amila Suriyaarachchi, Sanka Samaranayake, Lahiru Sandakith, Nandana , Saminda Abeyruwan and many more. Not least, but last all the members of the Axis2 project who has contributed a lot to make the project a success. Thank you all.

Hope you will learn from this book and enjoy it.

yum install problem on Fedora

2011-02-02T21:07:00.000-08:00

When you use Fedora older version you might get following error and spend hours and hours to solve the problem.

problem:
yum install libcurl-devel
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories

And here is the solution:
You need to edit all the files in (end with .repo) /etc/yum.repos.d/, and update the baseURI to following

http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/

Axis2 1.5.3 released

2010-11-18T15:55:00.000-08:00

The Apache Axis2 team is pleased to announce the general availability
of the Axis2 1.5.3 release.

1.5.3 is a maintenance release that contains the following improvements:

* Improved support for SSL when using the servlet transport: Axis2 can
now be configured so that generated WSDLs contain https endpoints
(AXIS2-4465).
* Improved compatibility with Rampart (AXIS2-3213 and AXIS2-4870) and
Sandesha2 (potential HTTP connection pool starvation).
* Axiom has been upgraded to 1.2.10. This version contains performance
improvements relevant for Rampart.
* Application (business) faults are no longer logged at level ERROR
(AXIS2-4280).
* Improved conformance to the SAAJ specifications. The 1.5.3 release
contains a set of fixes and improvements for the SAAJ implementation
developed on the trunk and not included in previous releases from the
1.5 branch.
* Axis2 now relies exclusively on dependencies available from the
Maven central repository, and no other Maven repositories are
required. This in particular fixes a build problem that appeared after
the 1.5.2 release.
* The Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA plugins are again available for
download via the Axis2 Web site (previous 1.5.x versions could only be
downloaded from the Maven repository).

The complete list of JIRA issues fixed in this maintenance release can
be found here:

https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&pid=10611&fixfor=12315367

The new version is available for download at the following location:

http://axis.apache.org/axis2/java/core/

Please report any issues via JIRA: http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AXIS2.

As always, we welcome any and all feedback at:

java-dev@axis.apache.org - for developer-related questions/concerns
java-user@axis.apache.org - for general questions, usage, etc.

Thanks for your interest in Apache Axis2!

-- The Apache Axis2 team

ConnectException when connecting to Tomcat

2010-10-05T16:28:00.000-07:00

If you are experiencing following exception when you try to connect to tomcat either using Java socket, TCP Monitor or any other means, then try the following procedure:

java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.doConnect(Unknown Source)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(Unknown Source)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(Unknown Source)
at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(Unknown Source)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Unknown Source)

Go to conf directory in the Tomcat installation directory, and then edit the server.xml as follows:

<Connector port="8080" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
address="127.0.0.1"
maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"

By default Tomcat does not come with the address attribute, once you set that to localhost or any address you want, then you will be able to solve the above exception.

Web services past, present and future

2010-08-24T17:37:00.000-07:00

What is a Web service? There are multiple definitions or understandings about Web services, one can argue Google search as a Web service, meaning a service offered via Web, same way Amazon retailer site can be also considered as a Web service, because it offers a way to buy and sell product over the Web, or application to application communication through open protocol like SOAP can be also considered as Web service. However, here my main focus is SOAP based Web services, meaning application to application communication.

In the distributed system, remote service invocation is not a new thing at all, even in the early papers on operating system design discussed about remote procedure calls or RPC. In fact they have provided sound architecture to implement RPC. Later, people wanted to develop more complex and application aware middleware to have distributed communication, among them CORBA and Java RMI became two commonly used technologies. Nevertheless, due to complexity of CORBA and domain dependency of Java RMI (only within JAVA) people tend to find other alternatives. Introduction of XML into the industry influenced lot on this effort. Then, people realized XML as the future communication media, in fact Bill Gates also believed XML going to be the dominant media for applications communication.

As a results of long collaboration between IBM and Microsoft (and also some other companies), SOAP came into the industry as a way of building application communication middleware. IBM started its implementation of SOAP based web service middleware and later donated that to Apache Software Foundation and which became Apache SOAP, and started Web service community around Apache. Apache SOAP was very simple and assumed to be proof of concepts; people really liked Apache SOAP and started to use it to application integration, then demanded a set of new features, which leads to have an array of Web service standards and specifications. In addition a set of Web service bodies to enforce satisfaction of specifications. At that time there were multiple Web service frameworks out there, Apache had Apache SOAP and Apache Axis, and Microsoft had Indigo (later renamed to .Net), Oracle, Sun, BEA, HP and few other companies had their own implementations.

One of the natures of any application is need of evolving and revolving, same thing happen to Web services, where it started as a simple set of standards, but today there are a number of standards. As a matter of fact Web service has become somewhat complex for average people. Even though there are hundreds of Web service specifications, there is no single Web service framework which implements all the standard, according to my understanding Axis2 is the only open source Web service framework implement highest number of standards, and of course Microsoft is leading in commercial market.

One of the main barrier of Web services is the complexity of WSDL, both WSDL 1 and WSDL 2 are little too complex to understand. In addition other standard like Security, Reliability and Addressing are way too complex for simple usages. That is something, standard bodies need to consider about.

Way back in 2004 when we started Axis2, one of the key goal was to have less than 1 MB size for the distribution, but, due to supported specifications and features it is way too big and complex. I have seen number of concerns on the mailing lists. I think this is true for any product, when they keep adding features, application become complex and size become larger.
Within a short period of time, Web services have made big impact to the industry, where most use Web service as a way of application integration. In addition most applications offer a Web service interface to access the service (e.g., Google, Amazon, Weather), which help to write custom components and application. Above all, with cloud computing, Web service became one of the standard ways to manage and monitor cloud based services. Simply, Web services have won the market today. But what will happen in the future …..

I think, due to complexity of Web service, people tend to find other alternatives or ways to reduce the complexity of Web services, but one thing is obvious that is XML will remain unchanged. In the future regards REST will play a major role, even today some believe REST is better than SOAP, which is in fact true for some scenarios, but when it comes to complex scenarios REST is not there to support them. Simply need additional specifications to handle addressing, security and etc… which will end up being yet another SOAP based Web service framework. As a Web service lover, I still believing in Web services, but I would like it to be simple and easy to use, yet provide what industry need.

Social networking and our lives

2010-07-26T20:43:00.000-07:00

Recent analysis revealed the popularity of social networks, which become much obvious when you watch movies, television or even when you listen to radio. Most application and products try to use Social networks as a way of reaching the people, either they would say meet them on social networks or they might say they have first class support for social networks (e.g., mobile phones). Whether it is good or bad, social networking has become a major part of our lives, everyone tries to share their day to day activities on social networks in addition sharing photos and videos is also an interesting habit. Few years back I used to receive so many emails from my friends about various funny things, now I hardly receive emails on funny stuffs, now the trend is different and everyone uses social network for sharing the funny and entertaining things. Which I think drastically reduces the storage requirements; with the traditional emails we all duplicate the data (if we were to download the emails) now the data stay in one location.

Facebook seems to be doing a very impressive job with the social networks and they define what social network is, they constantly introduce new features and make it part of social networking. A lot of companies including Google try to come to social networking, but most did not succeed. As Google does not have any completion for search, emails, youtube and maps from anyone else, Facebook and twitter are leading the social networking. Due to popularity of the Facebook it has diverse set of user community and which has become a very good advertisement media for them, in fact that is something Google needs to be aware of.

Installing IIS server without Windows CD

2010-05-12T08:08:00.000-07:00

I use Apache Web server for all my experiments; however, due to a specific reason I had to use ASP/.NET windows web hosting for one of my project. To test the application I wanted to start IIS, and then I found I cannot install IIS without having a CD. Unfortunately, I wanted to deploy the application on a remote machine which does not have a CD driver. After searching, I found following as an alternative to solve the issues.

First download the archive file: Download
Then extract it.

Go to:
Control Panel
Add/Remove programs
Add Windows components
And then pick IIS.

It will ask to insert the CD, press OK. Next, browse to the location where you extract the downloaded file. Installer asks few times to insert the CD, every time point it to the extracted location.

Ping Tutorial: 15 Effective Ping Command Examples

2010-04-22T21:12:00.000-07:00

A very good guide - Ping

Setting default SSH shell to bash

2010-02-06T09:15:00.000-08:00

I spent some times to figure out how to execute a remote command using “bash” and thought of sharing my findings (make your job easier).

An easy way is to go and edit ~/.profile and add the bash over there.

However above will not work if you try to remotely execute a script file, to solve that issues you need to edit

/etc/passwd

Find the entry corresponding to your logging and edit the last part of the entry for example; if the entry is like;

abc:x:13:13:abc:/bin:/bin/sh
then change that to
abc:x:13:13:abc:/bin:/bin/bash

You are in the business now…

How to disable service listing in Axis2

2009-12-30T10:59:00.000-08:00

Number of users have requested to have a way to enable/disable service listing in Axis2. What that means is, by default Axis2 list out all the service in the system when you go the following URL;

http://localhost:8080/axis2/services/listServices

However there are situation where we do not need to expose our services publicly, in such a situation following would comes handy.

To enable/disable service listing use following parameter in axis2.xml (WEB-INF/con/axis2.xml).

<parameter name="disableServiceList">true</parameter>

True – Disable
False -Enable

Adding this does not prevent listing service under administration window, to stop it, you need to change the default username and password. You can do that by changing the following two paramters.

<parameter name="userName">admin</parameter>
<parameter name="password">axis2</parameter>

You can download the fix here, replace axis2-kernel.jar (WEB-INF/lib) with this.

ApacheCon Asia 2009

2009-11-28T07:13:00.000-08:00

ApacheCon is one of the main even ASF organizes each year, usually there are two main Apachecon, one in USA and on in EU. In 2006 we extend ApacheCon in to Asia and had the very first ApacheCon Asia in Colombo, Sri Lanka. And believe that was one of the very successful ApacheCon, even with security situation in country we were able to get a number of national and international speakers. Finally it was a great event....

After 3 years, Sri Lanka FOSS community organizing the second ApacheCon Asia both in Colombo, Sri Lanka and Beijing, China. I hope this time it will be much more better than 2006, unfortunately I am going to miss it....

Other than USA and few Europe countries, Sri Lanka has a large number of Apache Committers and Contributors (over 60 committers), so this would be a good chance for them to get together and meet other apache folks.

Google Open Source Blog: Tasty New Google Summer of Code Stats

2009-09-11T07:02:00.000-07:00

Google Open Source Blog: Tasty New Google Summer of Code Stats

University of Moratuwa became the number one in Google Summer of Code

2009-09-11T06:45:00.000-07:00

It is so nice to hear that University of Moratuwa has became the number one in the Google summer code for the second consecutive year. Congratulation !!!

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/09/tasty-new-google-summer-of-code-stats.html

I strongly believe Dr Sanjiva is the one who started this trend, and helped all of us to contribute to the world of open source and gain most benefits from it. And the small island (my Sri Lanak) has became the top contributor to the open source. Thank you for guiding us and helping us.

Happy birthday Axis2 !!!

2009-08-20T20:57:00.000-07:00

Five years ago, that is in 21 August 2004, we started Apache Axis2 project. Withing this small period Axis2 has become the most commonly used open source Web Service framework. And number of companies out there using Axis2 for their SOA applications. Withing this small period Axis2 has opened a number of opportunities, which includes new companies, various graduate opportunities and ect..

Why 21 st of August is important ? Well that is because that is the date we had the first face2face meeting on Axis2.

Let's look back some of the history of Axis2 project.

This is the First email that Srinath sent to the list announcing Axis2 F2F

These are the first set of people who come to the Axis2 F2F.

This is the summary mail of the first F2F

Initial developers of the project
Srinath, Ajith, Chinthaka, Chathura, Glen, Dims, Sanjiva and myself. And of course Jaliya and Dasarath also contributed a lot.

At the initial stage of Axis2 we used to have weekly chat, what special about those chat is we(initial developers) implement a prototype and discuss about that at the weekly chat. The funny thing is all most all the days, we have to throw that prototype and start a new one after the chat.
Here is the chat log of the first weekly chat.

From the day one of the project we used to follow the Apache guidelines, so we create patch and send them to the list. Then existing commiters can apply them, most of the time Alex and Dims used to apply those patches.

Here is the very first patch of the project.

When we start the project we did not have any commiter for Axis2 project, we had WS commiters. So following are the initial commiters of Axis2 project and here is the commiiter nomination email.

[VOTE][Axis2]Ajith, Deepal and Chinthaka for Axis2 Commiter

At the initial stage of the project we had so many milestone release before we hit 0.94 release. Here is the announcement email for first release of Axis2.
Axis2 first release – Axis2 M1

First few F2F

First F2F 21-24 August 2004, Colombo, Sri Lanka. And here is the first set of people who came to the event
Second F2F March 29-31st 2005 – Comobo, Sri Lanka
Third F2F and hackathon – December, 2005, San Diago, USA
Fourth F2F and hackathon - Indiana University, Bloomington

And here is my first email to Axis2 mailing list

My first mail to the list

Amazon EC2 and instances failures

2009-08-07T17:55:00.000-07:00

I really like Amazon EC2 and I use that for different kind of experiments. Most of the time I use small, large and high cpu extra large instances. Most of the time my experiments run for about 10~15 hours, so far so good. I like Amazon I can easily scale out my experiments, I can easily increase the number of instances, if the instances is not enough to handle my application then I can move to different instance type etc...

However I am experiencing some issues, first issues is when I start about 10~15 instances most of them start quickly and few take a long time to start, because of that I have to wait (and pay additional $$ to amazon) to start my experiments. Even after I start my experiment, some times some of the instances become un-reachable, thats the killer. When that happen I have no option other than rebooting (or waiting a long time..) the instance(s) and restart the experiment. So my 15 hours experiment end up running for 25~30 hours. Issues is I have to pay $$ ...

I believe this is something Amazon has to address, EC2 idea is cool, but due to some network and infrastructure issues we can not use the EC2 as we expected.

Sometime this instance failure last only for few minutes and come back fine, sometime we really need to reboot or terminate the instances.

Who is master in Math and why?

2009-07-03T17:49:00.001-07:00

One of my colleague explained me a very nice story he learned by reading the book called “Outliers”. According that book, it says Asian are some what smarter when it come to mathematics. And there is a nice story behind that too, that is the number system they used. For example in English we start with, one, two three.... , ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen and etc... , if you think carefully. In English language though you pronounce as thirteen fourteen you write them differently. As en example when we call thirteen, it gave impression that the number is going to start with three, in fact it does not.

So, according the book this complexity make some issues in the childhood.

After listening to my friend I thought though this, then I found even in my own language (Sinhalese) we have some confusion. For example in Sinhalese when it come to 15 we pronounce is differently than other numbers, simply we break the sequence. From eleven to twenty we have a right sequence, the way we write and read is same except number 15.

How to fix MBR using Ubuntu live CD

2009-06-09T20:14:00.000-07:00

When we have dual boot there are some possibility that we might delete one of the partition, and causing deleting MBR as well. Issues can be easily fix using Windows CD, however you need to remember the password, if not ..

Ubuntu Live CD comes handy this case, just follow the following steps, you will be back in business.

Boot from Ubuntu Live CD
Then you need to download the ms-sys, you can find that from - http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/i386/ms-sys/download
Once downloaded it will ask for auto install, click that
Next type “sudo fdisk -l” , from that you can find the main partition you want to fix
Then type “sudo ms-sys -m /dev/sda”
Next restart, everything should work fine.

Axis2 1.5 released

2009-06-09T06:44:00.000-07:00

Axis2 1.5 released and available to download, this is a major release and has a number of changes

Removed the JDK 1.4 compatibility, now Axis2 works JDK 1.5 and above
Moving transport to a separate package
A number of bug fixes and
Many more new small scale improvements

You can download the release from http://ws.apache.org/axis2/

Thank you for using Axis2.

Axis2 tutorials and articles

2009-06-07T18:48:00.000-07:00

I have written a number of articles on Axis2, and those covers various topics on Axis2. However sometimes it is hard to find what you want, so I compiled a list of articles and categorized them in somewhat organized manner. I believe that will help to find the document you want with minimum time. And I will keep on updating this list, so that you can find all Axis2 articles in one place.

Axis2 Architecture

Axis2 Deployment

Axis2 Services

Axis2 MessageReceivers

Utilizing a Non-Java Web Service with Axis2

Axis2 Handlers

Axis2 Execution Framework

Axis2 Transport

The Axis2 Transport Framework

Axis2 Session

Axis2 Client

Axis2 Configurations

Axis2 General

Apache Axiom

Quickstart Apache Axis2

The Axis2 book

Power of Code generation

2009-06-03T17:23:00.000-07:00

Code generation is so powerful technology, and it is been used for various purposes and various places, and code generation is not a new concept as well. In the past even though people have not used the same name they have used the same concepts. Normally any given code generation tool there are four parts, and number of steps and component may very from one component to other

Code generation configurations
Transformation
Transformation configuration
Code generation

Configuration can be a property file, XML file or datafile or any other kind of document, and most of the time configuration can be human readable. Next is the transformation, for the transformation it could either be something like XSL or simple logic in the scripts of class file to do the transformation. Finally creating artifacts as the results.

A classic example of code generation can be seen in the Web Service field, there people use code generation to generate service and client code from a WSDL. In that case the configuration file would WSDL, and the transformation would be WSDL to Java, and transformation option would be, web service framework, language and etc..., and finally the output would the either or both service skeleton and the stub.

One other powerful use case of code generation is testing, specially in the process of staging testing, where we have some SLA to meet. We generate the code (scripts and configurations) and then measure the results, if it does not meet the expectation then we change the code generation configuration and re-generate the code and measure the results. We do this process until we get the expected results, doing this kind of process manually is so hard as well as error prone.

The most difficult part of the code generation is to identify the requirements including the input configuration and output format. Once we have that code generation is easy, and once we have the code generation tool, doing testing is so easy.

Most of the time what people do is do the experiments(testing) manually in a very small scale, and then use those code and configuration to build a code generation tool.

Scam from yahoo messenger

2009-04-26T12:04:00.000-07:00

I have been using Yahoo messenger more than 9 years, but did not have bad experience with that. However now I am starting to get a number of scam from Yahoo messenger. One thing I noticed is that all the scam I got when the person who is sending is off-line. So I do not know whether I am also sending those kind of message, if I have done : Please forgive me . I do not receive those scam from all the people in my contact list, but from only few. One of the common message I get

“Wow I finally found a way to lose weight and is inexpensive ...”

I think yahoo should take some action to stop this kind of scam, if the current security mechanisms are not enough to stop those scams, then they need to find an alternative to stop. The main reason is Yahoo is one of the most commonly use IM.

Xen: finishing the job

2009-03-30T07:35:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, Xen was the hot virtualization story. The Xen developers had a working solution for Linux - using free software - well ahead of anybody else, and Xen looked like the future of virtualization on Linux. Much venture capital chased after that story, and distributors raced to be the first to offer Xen-based virtualization. But, along the way, Xen seemed to get lost. The XenSource developers often showed little interest in getting their code into the mainline, and attempts by others to get that job done ran into no end of obstacles. So Xen stayed out of the mainline for years; the first public Xen release happened in 2003, but the core Xen code was only merged for 2.6.23 in October, 2007.

A nice article by Jonathan Corbet, which compare Xen and KVM. (worth reading)

Apache Software Foundation is 10 years old

2009-03-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

Apache Software Foundation celebrated its 10 year anniversary at ApacheCon EU. According to my knowledge ASF is one of the best open source foundation in the world. And it has a number of different projects. I am so happy to be a part of ASF and I am contributing to apache since 2004, so it is almost 5 years now. ASF has creatde a web page including most of the highlights of the last 10 years, I think it is worh reading.

Amazon EC2 – Building Apache Web Server

2009-03-25T06:52:00.000-07:00

In my previous post I explained how to do ssh and scp among EC2 instances, now I am going to discuss how to install Apache on EC2 (Fedora8). I know building Apache is not such a difficult work if you have setup the environment with all the essential libraries. However if it is not then it is some what difficult, in this post I am going to explain some of the challenges you may encounter if you try to build Apache on Fedora 8 (on EC2). You might imagine what is the difference between normal Fedora and Fedora for EC2, the main difference is EC2 runs on Xen hypervisor, so what you have is para-virtualization (you modify the OS to run on Xen).

First step is to install all the required libraries. So you need to install gcc and g++,
Installing gcc : yum install gcc
Installing xmms : yum install xmms
Installing g++ : yum install gcc-c++

In my case doing all those did not allow me to build the Apache, it was giving me an error saying “asm/page.h” does not found. Then I realize some of the OS related header files are missing in the OS image. To solve that I had to copy “/usr/include/asm” from a normal Fedora OS. After I did all those, boom Apache worked fine.

Just follow the same procedure if you want to setup your own dedicated servers.

Amazon EC2 – Communicating amoung instances

2009-03-22T17:38:00.000-07:00

These days I am doing some cool work with Amazon EC2, so there were a lot to learn and a lot to find out. One of the major challenge I faced was to communicating between instances. For my application I need to do “ssh” and “scp” among the nodes, and most of those taking place automatically. So I had hard time figuring out this, the main reason is in EC2 if you want to connect to an instance you have to give your key-pair. Which is not possible for my application. So what I did was following.

Run an instance with the your operating system (in my case I choose Fedora 8), when you run select the key-pair and security group.

Next you need to generate SSH key, you can do that using following command (Do not enter a passphrase)
ssh-keygen -t rsa

Now you need to go and edit the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys , For that copy the content of .ssh/id_rsa.pub and paste
Now open the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, and change the tail to be “root@domU” , basically you need to remove root@ec2-.. with new one
Then you need to edit the “~/.ssh/know_hosts” file and add the following,
*.amazon.com ssh-rsa Asasdas....
(Asasdas.... = content of rsa.pub)

Now you are all set (unless you need to install some other packages), next step is to bundle your image and register that with EC2 and S3. Then try running more than one instances, now if you try to do ssh among those you will find that you do not need to type the password, or you do not need to specify the key-pairs.

AWS Management Console

2009-03-11T08:39:00.000-07:00

If you are using Amazon EC2, then you would find the new AWS Management Console as a very useful tool. I agree you can have the same functionality using normal SOAP API but this is cool. As I see so far it is just read only data, but provide a handy way to look at the instances you have, AMIs you have created, various secuirty gropus, kep-pairs and etc.., I think it should provide additional methods such as,
- terminating an instance
- Deleting an AMI
- And may be remove data from S3

Then you can do most of the work without worring about the command line tools.

Cloud Computing infrastructure using Axis2

2009-02-22T16:52:00.000-08:00

Utility computing or the cloud computing is becoming the next generating computing platform, which reduces the time and cost. So when we want the resource we go and rent depending on the time we want and depending on the money we have. According to my understanding Amazon EC2 plays a big role in Cloud computing, and of course they use Web Services for almost everything.

Apart from commercial cloud infrastructure, there is on good open source cloud infrastructure as well, which is called EUCALYPTUS (a research project). I knew about this for a few months, but I did not know that they use Axis2 as the Web Service framework until today (Thanks Deep for letting me know that). One of the cool thing about EUCALYPTUS is that is functionally equal to Amazon EC2. So if you want to do the testing on your system before you move into Amazon EC2, then I think this is a good way of doing that.

Writing an Axis2 module

2009-02-16T06:31:00.000-08:00

One of the interesting feature of Axis2 is its nature of extensibility, there are a number of way to extend Axis2 functionality. Here I am going to discuss how to extend its core functionality, that is invoking customer code when a message is received to the system. All the WS* features (Reliability, Security etc..), implemented in this way. Here I am going to discuss how to write a very simple Axis2 module to count the number of incoming messages and outgoing messages.

For this module we need three main components,
- Incoming message handler
- Outgoing message handler
- Module configuration

Incoming message counter has a global counter, which will be incremented for each request, and the same way outgoing message counter also has a global counter which also incremented for each outgoing messages. Then finally Module configuration which specify the ordering of handler in the execution chain [Axis2 execution chain].

you can find the source code of all those components as well as executable module.

How to use the module?
To use the module, first you need to download the "counter-module.mar" and need to drop into "modules" directory in Axis2 [Axis2 deployment]. Then you need to engage the module, for that you can either
- Do that using axis2.xml <module ref="counter-module"/>
- Or you can do that using Axis2 management console
(login to the admin console, then go to the engage module menu bar at the left hand side).

How to see that working?
To see that working you can do any of the Axis2 service invocation [Axis2 client API], the simplest way is to invoke the version service. For that type the following in the browser.
http://localhost:8080/axis2/services/Version/getVersion

Then if you look at the server console (Tomcat console), you can see our module prints request and response count. If you invoke the service again you will see the number is getting incremented.

Resource
- Source code
- Binary file

What is WSO2 and WSO2 Carbon

2009-02-06T06:49:00.000-08:00

Reacently WSO2 relaased its company overview or the elivator pitch, check it out. What it is, who they are, what they do ....

One of my SOA teacher, Paul Fremantle (CTO, WSO2) has written a nice blog about WSO2 Carbon as well as his thought on SOA composition. I think that blog is very useful to get an understanding about what is going to happen in the future of SOA, how the component oriented architecture going to be used in SOA.

C is so powerful but not nice as Java

2009-02-02T17:29:00.000-08:00

I am doing Java programming more than 6 years now, and I think I had a chance to most of the J2SE components. And specially from Axis2 I learn a lot about Java. I always found Java is so nice, due to various reason, first it is easy to program, second it has number of tools support. If you have some problem, there is a high probability that someone has already found and written code for that, so that make your job so easier. Another most important factor is debugging support for Java, it is so easy to debug Java programs, including remote debugging. Additionally most of the IDEs written for Java has better support for debugging.

Anyway recently I got a chance to work on some of the cool C stuff, I remember I have done some C program for my undergraduate. There I did not do much work other than implementing some of the data structures and few sorting algorithms. So I believe my knowledge on C so little compared to Java. So the recent work involved a lot of low level C, concurrency, load balancing. I think that is a cool experience someone should have with C.

While doing so I faced some strange problem sometime took days figure out the issues, one of the main reason was my lack of knowledge on C program debugging. I tried to use “gdb” but that did not work for most of the cases. Other problem I faced was getting negative time, basically I got the time before starting my execution and got the time again after execution, and when I deduct end-start I got negative values. I found that a known problem and I even tried some of the workarounds sometimes. Anyway finally I got everything working fine, now I think now I am comfortable of reading any kind of C program at least understand that correctly, and may be modify that.

Essential Java resources

2009-01-27T10:31:00.000-08:00

This is very useful article, it has most of the resources you may need that if you are java developer. Which has collection of resources for Web sites and developer Web portals, Weblogs, Packages and/or libraries, Conferences and books.

Read the full article here.

Axis2 1.5 is coming stay tuned

2009-01-18T06:42:00.000-08:00

After about six month we are working towards getting Axis2 1.5 release. Glen has done two beta releases so far, so download the beta releases and see whether the issues you want to fix are fixed there. Then if it is doable team may consider that.

You can download the release from - here

If you see a problem create a JIRA

Component Oriented Architecture and WSO2 Carbon

2009-01-09T19:09:00.000-08:00

Computer industry is changing so rapidly and technology coming and going very fast, some are stay in the industry some longer duration and some are not. So anyway by looking at the technology movements I think next generation of computer would be component oriented. Where in the first place we had very tightly coupled computing with zero extensibility and zero flexibility. Then they moved to loosely coupled systems. A classic example of that is Service oriented architecture or SOA.

There the idea is everything in the system is services, so the communication between service happen using message passing. So system become so flexible and extensible. And there are few ways of implementing SOA too;

Using existing messaging system
POX- Plain Ole XML
Web services

And I think Web services became very success in the SOA, and it has become a industry stranded for SOA. So many specification, so many implementation. Above all due to standards and standards bodies like WSI, most of the implementations are said to be inter operate. For example Microsoft .Net and Apache Axis2 inter operate each others.

Moving beyond the service oriented architecture, now people are developing system using building blocks called components. With the introduction of OSGi it has become a very popular topic. When I heard about OSGi I did not realized the power of OSGi and specially components based systems. But now I know the power. Even Axis2 can be used as an OSGi bundle (or component).

By adopting to the new technology WSO2 has also moved most of its projects to OSGi based components, as a result of that they can build different kind of system integrating different building blocks of OSGi bundles. By looking at the activities going on, I would say WSO2 Carbon is becoming one of the coolest project or rather framework for building SOA related technologies, such as Web Services, ESB, Registry etc, ..

Fun with Google Maps

2009-01-09T16:19:00.000-08:00

We all know Google Maps is very powerful and useful tool, in the meantime no magic it is a software, and idea of this post is not to tell anything bad about Google Maps. Today I wanted to get directions to some place, after completing that just for fun I searched direction from Mountain View, LA, USA to Japan interestingly Google was able to give me the driving direction from MV to Japan, we know it is not possible to drive from USA to Japan, however due to some incorrect logic (bug) it gave me the directions :) . I know how hard to test all the use cases, so it is ok to have this kind of bugs in a software, it is tradeoff between usage and the perfrormance (being a software guy I know how hard to test all the edge cases). I know what I did was a crazy (who is going to drive from USA to Japan) thing too, ... but it was fun. Want to look at full directions ? see here

Autonomic Computing

2009-01-05T08:21:00.000-08:00

While I was reading about cloud computing I encounter the term “Autonomic computing”, then I found that it has a direct relationship with the cloud computing. First let's look at what it mean by Autonomic computing. Autonomic computing refers to the self-managing characteristics of distributed computing resources, adapting to unpredictable changes whilst hiding intrinsic complexity to operators and users. As name implies an autonomic system makes decisions on its own, using high-level policies such as service level agreement; it will constantly check and optimize its status and automatically adapt itself to changing conditions.

Nice thing here is that though it said to be self manage it does not have any Artificial Intelligent (AI) involve with it, it is just control theory. Having said that Autonomic computing can be modeled in terms of two main control loops (local and global) with sensors (for self-monitoring), effectors (for self-adjustment), knowledge and planer/adapter for exploiting policies based on self- and environment awareness.

Typical Autonomic Computing system will contains following characteristics,

Self-Configuration: Automatic configuration of components;
Self-Healing: Automatic discovery, and correction of faults;
Self-Optimization: Automatic monitoring and control of resources to ensure the optimal functioning with respect to the defined requirements;
Self-Protection: Proactive identification and protection from arbitrary attacks.

History repeat itself – Cloud computing

2008-12-31T16:41:00.000-08:00

When we look at the history of computers in early days having a computer is not a common thing, only the people and companies who had millions of dollars were able to own a computer. And it is true that, it started as a central based computing with time sharing. So if we want to get a computer job done then we had to go to the operator and submit our job and pay the cost. Gradually technology evolved and owning a personal computer became a common thing. Almost everyone has access to a personal computer now.

So Mainframe based computing had evolved to distributed computing, simply we can do almost anything with our personal computers, and they are more than 1000 times better than early days computers. But I think we are going back to the central based model of computing again, the reason behind my argument is cloud computing.

With cloud computing all the resources in a central place (there will be number of centers), and someone will be responsible for managing all the hardware and provide that as a service HaaS. And will manage software for us and provide Software as a service SaaS. So what we do is use those services and pay the cost based on the time we used. It is like taking a taxi, we do not need to worry about anything like, maintains, parking etc.. . So I consider cloud computing as something almost similar to those old days central based computing, in fact in large scale.

Happy new year 2009

2008-12-31T08:32:00.001-08:00

Another year, another chance
To start our lives anew;
This time we’ll leap old barriers
To have a real breakthrough.

We’ll take one little step
And then we’ll take one more,
Our unlimited potential
We’ll totally explore.

We’ll show off all our talents
Everyone will be inspired;

We’ll give up all bad habits;
We’ll read and learn a lot,
All our goals will be accomplished,
Sigh...or maybe not.

Wish You A Happy New Year !!

Curtsy : Joanna Fuchs

Prison Break and our life

2008-12-29T09:27:00.000-08:00

I do not watch that much of TV series, but due to some reason I stated to watch prison break. It was one of a kind. The main reason I like it is, specially in season1 and season2 it was all about master planing. There they have looked into every possible outcome and planed according to that. I think that is something very useful in day to day life. And I strongly believe we can not succeed without having a long term goal. If we have a goal then we can and we will find a way to accomplish that. So we need to think what we need to do after 5 years, after 10 years and etc.. , and then we should plan accordingly. That is exactly what happed in PB season1 and 2, however in season3 and 4 they have forgotten that, there it is just day to day goal and the story moving here and there. However it is still interesting to watch.

The transformation of Animal into Food

2008-12-25T11:50:00.000-08:00

Most of us eat and enjoy animal meat, but did you ever think how do they make or transform animal into food. Killing any kind of animal is not a good thing and we all know that. But killing animal like that(as shown in the video) is not acceptable any means.

“Life on the farm isn't what it used to be. The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes portrayed in children's books have been replaced by windowless sheds, tiny crates, wire cages, and other confinement systems integral to what is now known as "factory farming." “

Watch the following video if and only if you are serious about that you are going to stop eating meats. Think twice before watching the video.

Source

Axis2 Information Model

2008-12-19T08:05:00.000-08:00

In Axis2 there are two main types of data, which static data and dynamic data. Static data coming from the various description file, whereas dynamic data is created at the runtime. I recently wrote an article explaining the available types of static data, that will help you to get some understanding about various static data types, as well as when and how they are going to be created.

Read the full article.

Servlet API and available ports of the application server

2008-12-18T07:39:00.000-08:00

Servlets are something we heavily used in Application server environment. And it provide accessing most of the information we need about the application sever and the context. However it does not provide a way to get the type of ports that is being exposed. For example a servlet may be exposed in HTTP (8080) and HTTPS (8443), then it would be able to get those port information from the servlet API. All those informations are available at the application server, so why not servlet API expose those information.

Improvement to Google Maps

2008-12-10T10:45:00.000-08:00

Google Maps is very cool and very useful, sometime it is very difficult to go one location to another without having support for Maps like Google. But I think Google need to add one improvements to the Map. That is it should be able to track the current location from the IP and then open the Map. Other wise whenever we go to somewhere we need to find the address and search that in Google.

This can be easily done in all the cases, for example if I search maps using my computer then it can get the IP and from the IP it can probably get the location. So it should be able to find at least very close estimate. Second if we browse from a mobile then it should be able to track the location using the GPS coordinates. So any case it should be able to track my current location.

Getting SPEC Benchmark working on WebSphere

2008-11-20T14:18:00.000-08:00

Currently I am in the process of getting SPEC benchmark working on few application servers , first got that working in Jboss , and the documentation they have provided is very useful. Then I started to work on WebSphere (with MySQL) but I still could not able to get that working. So if anyone has got the specjAppServer2004 working on WebSphere , please share those configurations with me.

Singularity: Microsoft's Open Source Operating System

2008-11-19T06:31:00.000-08:00

I did not know something like this before though the OS is around since 2003.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/Singularity-Open

Microsoft’s new "M" programming language

2008-11-16T15:08:00.000-08:00

Microsoft has recently introduce a new language called "M" , at the last ApacheCon bar camp Paul did a talk on that and I found very interesting. As I learn from Paul , it help you to build new language very easily and you can see the syntax tree while you building the language. I still did not get time to have a look at that , but I am planing to do that soon.

A Petri Net Approach to Analysis and Composition of Web Services

2008-11-10T17:13:00.000-08:00

My friend Xiong Pengcheng recently publish his research work on Web service transactional journal , the paper is more about Web service composition and BPEL . Abstract of the paper as

Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) is becoming the industrial standard for modeling web service based business processes. The check of behavioral compatibility for web service composition is one of the most important topics. The commonly used reachability exploration method focuses on verifying deadlock-freeness. When this property is violated, the states and traces in the reachability graph only give clues to re-design the composition. The process must then repeat itself until no deadlock is found. In this paper, multiple web services interaction is modeled with a Petri net called Composition net (C-net for short). The problem of behavioral compatibility among web services is hence transformed into the deadlock structure problem of a C-net. If there exist incompatibility cases, a policy based on appending additional information channels is proposed. It is proved that the policy can offer a good solution as well as be mapped back into the original BPEL models automatically.

Microsoft movement to Apache with Axis2

2008-11-09T19:46:00.000-08:00

One of the main enemy for most of the open source companies is nothing but Microsoft , so being an open source foundation Apache has the same thing. I know Apache does not compete with someone , but developers had that thing in their mind.

ApacheCon US 2008 was one of the history making event in software field , thats is due to two reason. First Microsoft sponsored first ever ApacheCon , second they publicly announce their movement to Apache. I was listening to key note speak done by Sam Ramji (from Microsoft) , it was one of the best keynote I have ever attend. He openly mentioned some of the wrong impressions that MS people have about Apache , one classic example is when he decided to sponsor ApacheCon he has received a number of emails saying “Why do you sponsor for IIS competitor” , that is mainly because people think Apache as Apache Web server. They do not know Apache consists of a number of other projects , in fact 62 top level projects.

It is interesting to see that Microsoft some to Apache specially with a project that I have contributed a lot , which is Axis2. Microsoft and WSO2 were doing a number of interop over the last few months , and even there was a live interop at the last .Net camp. Which was an interop solution for stock trader application which communicate with Java , .Net and PHP. That particular application is now going to start as a incubator project in Apache called “Stonehenge”. That is the start of Microsoft contribution to open source via Apache.

How does it works ? Car system Explained

2008-11-02T11:32:00.000-08:00

If you have a car and if you want to learn how things are working then following link would be helpful , it explains some of the stuff in very simple manner.

http://www.2carpros.com/how_does_it_work.htm

VMWare Recording and Replay

2008-10-29T12:25:00.000-07:00

Simply, it allows for making a recording of (almost) everything that happens to a VM between the time you hit Record and the time you hit Stop. This is not a movie recording, but more of an execution recording. You can play it back however many times you like. Most important thing is it records at the instruction level , so it keeping the complete memory and system state.
The process is said to be deterministic , because it keeps all the instruction that send from the guest operating system. Which include all the IO instructions (Network , CD and all kind of IO) , user clicks and any other type of asynchronous call as well.

What is this good for? Well, have you ever tried testing a program only to encounter a bug that you just can’t reproduce? Maybe there was some memory corruption that happened under some specific case that you just can’t seem to diagnose. Or maybe it’s a network packet that came in in some form that your application didn’t expect. Under normal circumstances, you’d have to do a lot of guesswork in order to find out what exactly happened. Far too often, it’s just too hard to reproduce the bug and it goes unfixed for some time.

Now imagine instead that you’re testing the program in Workstation and, before your testing, you hit Record. You attempt the test and the program crashes in some weird manner. No problem. Hit Stop and replay the recording. Just before the crash occurs, stop the playback and attach a debugger. Messed up? Didn’t find the cause? Replay that recording again.

In addition to the programming debugging this can be used as a fault tolerance and clustering technique. Where you can create an environment with same VM image and then you can pick one of them as the primary and other one as the backup . When the actual invocation happen rather then recording the events in the primary image , you can send them to the backup image. So if the primary fails , backup can easily take over. Because it is not just a replicate , it is an identical to the primary at anytime.

Finally I consider this as a very handy tool as well as can be used to many application to save the time. May be in the future when you report a bug you can attach the VM record log so that other people can easily reproduce the error.

Yahoo is going open ?

2008-10-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

Today I got a chance to listen to a very interesting talk from Dr. Larry Heck , he is the Vice President, Search & Advertising Sciences, Yahoo. The title of the talk was Large Scale Data Analysis for Web Search & Online Advertising R&D Using Pig™ and Hadoop™ . The talk is interesting due to few reasons , first he did a great job explaining how yahoo search and yahoo advertisement works. And he explained some of the algorithm behind the secret of yahoo search and advertisement. One thing I heard most useful is that seems like Yahoo is moving towards open source ,and they are try to open all of there search API open so that would be a very good news. Actuallty as the frist setp that they have open sourced and controbuting to Apache Hadoop and Apache Pig. It is amaze to see the perfromance improvements they have gained after they have moved to above metiuoned apache tool. They have able to reduce some of the taksed which took more than few days to less than hour.

Part of the abstarct from his talk

Pig™ is an open-source platform for analyzing large data sets that consists of a high-level language for expressing data analysis programs, coupled with infrastructure for evaluating these programs. The salient property of Pig™ programs is that their structure is amenable to substantial parallelization, which in turns enables them to handle very large data sets. Its infrastructure layer consists of a compiler that produces sequences of Map-Reduce programs, for which large-scale parallel implementations already exist (e.g., Hadoop™).

Axis2 tutorial at Apachecon US 2008

2008-10-14T06:17:00.000-07:00

I am planing to do an Axis2 tutorial in ApacheCon US 2008 , so if you are interested in attending that tutorial I think its time for registration. The tutorial will cover , introduction to Axis2 , Deploying Axis2 , Writing services , invoking services , session management and etc..

How to Control Binding Generation in Axis2 ?

2008-10-13T07:12:00.000-07:00

Whenever you deploy a service in Axis2 , it generates a WSDL for you. You are able to see the WSDL generated when by executing a “?wsdl” for your service. If you look closer you will see that the WSDL generated has three bindings.

* SOAP11 binding
* SOAP12binding
* HTTPbinding

So next question is how to control the binding generation behavior. To address that I wrote a knowledge base in OT. Read full KB

Good lesson not to trust electronic equipment

2008-10-12T16:21:00.000-07:00

Today something interesting thing happened to me. I had to drop one of my friend into his place. Actually he bought a new car recently and I had to help him to learn how to drive and then drop him to where he live. So we got the printout of the direction, however some other friend of mine gave me a GPS navigator. So I thought that is easier than reading printout and go.

So I put the destination on the GPS navigator and asked to select the root skipping highways. So it did a good job and directed me how to go. So I was driving for a while , may be about 15-18 miles, I took few left and right turn. So now I have no idea where am I , and actually I do not need to know. Because GPS can help me to go there. Unfortunately when I was driving I suddenly realized that the GPS does not work !!!! , I got STUCK

So now I am in a big trouble I have no idea where I am , and I do not have a city map as well. So I took few roots to see whether I find any of the familiar road, unfortunately I did not find any. So I decided to go to a gas station and ask about that. So I went there and ask the person about the location I need to go , he said no he do not know. Then I asked him whether he knows how to get in to Georgia Tech , then he said yes. So luckily he told me the to take the high way , but he said that he is not sure about the exist. So I took the highway and went about few miles, oh I found an exist which I know !!!

So it was a good lesson for me ,I should not always trust the electronic items , we need to have something ready when we faces some unexpected situation like this.

Embedding Apache Axis2 into Existing Applications

2008-10-10T05:58:00.000-07:00

Axis2 can be deployed and used in various manner , we can use Axis2 as a client to invoke a remote service , we can use Axis2 as a Web services server to deploy Web services. And we can deploy Axis2 inside an application server and deploy Web services. In addition that we can embed Axis2 into existing application , so I wrote an article to discuss the procedure of embedding Axis2 into an existing application.

Read the full story

Request Arrival time tracking with Tomcat

2008-10-04T05:20:00.000-07:00

This is something I really wanted but I did not find that so after doing some amount of work I found a way to track the request arrival time of Tomcat. By default it records request depart time and service time. There are some instances having that is not enough , so I did the following and get the job done.

- Implement the lifecycle interface that Tomcat has
- Then add a Value component in Tomcat (server.xml)

So class would be something like below , of course it is very simple one , need to modified but it just does the job.

public class TimeTracker
extends ValveBase
implements Lifecycle {

protected LifecycleSupport lifecycle = new LifecycleSupport(this);
private boolean started = false;

public ResourceTrackingAccessLogValve() {
super();
}


public void invoke(Request request, Response response)
throws IOException, ServletException {

// Pass this request on to the next valve in our pipeline
long t1 = System.nanoTime();
getNext().invoke(request, response);
long t2 = System.nanoTime();
long time = t2 - t1;
System.out.println("ArriveTime ns " + t1 + " Departtime ns " + t2 + " ServiceTime : " + time);

}

public void addLifecycleListener(LifecycleListener listener) {

lifecycle.addLifecycleListener(listener);

}


public LifecycleListener[] findLifecycleListeners() {

return lifecycle.findLifecycleListeners();

}


public void removeLifecycleListener(LifecycleListener listener) {

lifecycle.removeLifecycleListener(listener);

}


public void start() throws LifecycleException {
// Validate and update our current component state
if (started)
throw new LifecycleException
(sm.getString("accessLogValve.alreadyStarted"));
lifecycle.fireLifecycleEvent(START_EVENT, null);
started = true;
}


public void stop() throws LifecycleException {

// Validate and update our current component state
if (!started)
throw new LifecycleException
(sm.getString("accessLogValve.notStarted"));
lifecycle.fireLifecycleEvent(STOP_EVENT, null);
started = false;

}


}


And then need to add the following Value tag in server.xml

<Valve className="org.log.ResourceTrackingAccessLogValve"
directory="logs" prefix="localhost_resource_log."
suffix=".txt"
domain="Catalina"
pattern="%a %t %D %s %b %U %q %m" resolveHosts="false"/>

The crowd within

2008-09-29T19:13:00.000-07:00

A battle of ideas is going on inside your mind

THAT problem solving becomes easier when more minds are put to the task is no more than common sense. But the phenomenon goes further than that. Ask two people to answer a question like “how many windows are there on a London double-decker bus” and average their answers. Their combined guesses will usually be more accurate than if just one person had been asked. Ask a crowd, rather than a pair, and the average is often very close to the truth. The phenomenon was called “the wisdom of crowds” by James Surowiecki, a columnist for the New Yorker who wrote a book about it. Now a pair of psychologists have found an intriguing corollary. They have discovered that two guesses made by the same person at different times are also better than one.

Do you want to read the full story ?

I hope you may start to read the book as well.

Configuring Axis2 via axis2.xml

2008-09-24T05:27:00.000-07:00

As you have already realized there are a number of parameters in Axis2. You can easily change them as you wish, but the problem you might have is the meaning of those parameters. So I recently wrote an article explaining most commonly used parameters in Axis2.

Read it and tell me , if I have missed any of the parameters.

http://wso2.org/library/tutorials/learning-axis2-xml-part1

Bad side of social networks

2008-09-22T17:21:00.000-07:00

I do not think any one of us new to the term social networks , how many social networks out there ? . And I am sure you belong to at least one of them. When I say social networks there are different kind of networks. Some of them are profession networks such as LinkedIn , and some of them are network for fun (facebook) , some of them to share images (flicker). Not only that number of social networks are going up very rapidly.

If we look at those social networks , different network gather different data from us. If we look at the professional networks they will collect data like places where you have worked , type of the work you have done. On the other hand if you look at fun type of networks , it collects data like what do you like to do at the leisure time , what places you would like to visit and etc... , at the end of the day all those networks collect so much of personal data from you. With knowing or not knowing , we let those applications to collect and share our data. I agree that I am also a member of a number of networks.

Now let's see what are the problem associate with having those personal data for public usage.

First thing is you start to receive a number of unwanted or what we call as junk mail , because someone can find your name and email from those networks and then find the areas your are interested in and then send emails. And we all know what happen when your email address goes public.

Second , from those social networks one can find your friends. And then someone can send emails or photo links as your friends sending to you [A good example is tagging and commenting in facebook]. When you see a mail from your friend saying look at this nice picture , you are most likely to click that link. Then it might take you to bad site and ask your to login to the applications which is similar to the that of your social network home page. Then they can collect your user name and password. This is very risky because most of the people use same user name and password for various places.

Third , say you have a friend call “Foo” in facebook , then that person is not there in your professional network. Now what happen is someone (not Foo) can send an invitation asking adding you as a friend in your professional networks. Since the name is familiar to you , without checking too much you will allow to add that person to your network. Once you allow , he can send request to some other friend of you , then that person will also allow , because he is already a friend of yours. This is often happen in entertaining network like facebook.

I am sure there are enough information out there in various social networks , where someone can collect those information and do online transactions or login into your bank accounts. In my view I think social network help a lot for phishing attacks as well.

One thing to remember is yes , social networks are good and fun as well as help a lot. But there is bad site of that, we need to know what kind of data we allow to share. Specially , when you provide your personal information like birthday , address , phone numbers think twice and provide.

Exposing data bases as a Web service

2008-09-18T08:50:00.001-07:00

I know Data service is one of the hot area in the Web services world, data service is nothing but enabling Web services support for the relational data bases. There are a number of ways of doing that. However Axis2 and WSO2 has a built a very cool and easy way of doing that. Which is called WSO2 Data services. I think I have mentioned the architecture of Data services in few months back. Today I am not going to talk about that , rather I am going to lists some of the very cool feature in WSO2 data services 1.0 release.

You can download that , which is free and release under Apache 2.0 license. So if you do not like how that work you can change that , I am sure you do not want to do that. Because you will be more than happy with the set of features that has :)

* Service enable data locked in relational databases, CSV and
Microsoft Excel files
* Zero code approach - simple XML descriptor file is all you need
* Easy configuration via web based graphical console / Eclipse
plugin wizard
* Customizable XML output
* Both REST & WS-* support
* Built-in Connection pooling support
* Aggregate data from multiple data sources
* Support for exposing Stored procedures & functions
* Built-in caching to enhace performance
* Throttling to ensure that your database is never overloaded
* Try-it tool to test the services on the fly
* Secured access to data
* Reliable delivery of messages

WSO2 Web Services Framework for Jython using Axis2

2008-09-18T08:50:00.000-07:00

Adding one more scripting support to Axis2 WSO2 has announced Jython support to Axis2. So now you can deploy and access Web services using Jython. It is very cool idea. Luckily I got a chance to involve this a lot with Heshan (a student from , University of Colombo) , who did the implementation work. Actually this is my second chance to get involve with scripting support for Axis2 , first one was JRuby support which was done by Thilina (Student from University of Moratuwa.)

WSO2 WSF/Jython provides an amazingly simple approach to create (Code First) and consume Web Services in Jython. This framework integrates the Apache Axis2 web services engine into Jython. Thus, providing all the power and versatility of the
Axis2 engine to the Jython user. Now, with just a few lines of code, Jython users can enjoy the benefits of Service Oriented Architecture using Web Services in their applications.

Web Service clients written using WSF/Jython framework could invoke enterprise web services which require WS-Security. Sending binary attachments as MTOM is also supported.

WSO2 WSF/Jython is released under the Apache License v2.0.

There are two packages that comes with this release, the server side and the client side.

For more information, please visit our project home page,
http://wso2.org/projects/wsf/jython

You can download this release from:
http://wso2.org/downloads/wsf/jython

Client Side Features (Explained in detail here)
-----------------------------------------------

* Support for invoking Web Services in a simple clean manner

* Ability to use WS-Addressing when invoking services

* Ability to invoke services which require WS-Security

* Ability to send binary attachments using MTOM

Server side Features (Explained in detail here)
--------------------

* Support for exposing services written in Jython

* DataBinding support using a simple annotation mechanism

* Automated WSDL generation

* Ability to expose all enterprise features of Axis2 to services written in Jython

Axis2 transports as a new project

2008-09-17T06:52:00.000-07:00

When we start Axis2 , Axiom was part of Axis2. And then we realized that the advantage of moving Axiom into a separate project , so we moved Axiom into Ws-Common. After that a number of project started to use that. As you know Axis2 core is transport independent as well as Axis2 has number of transports support. At the moment projects like Apache Synapse are using Axis2 transport. And they do not need full Axis2 to have Axis2 transport support. So moving transport into a separate project will be benefited for many people. So last week I was able to move all the transports from Axis2 to new module in WS-Commons. And Dims helped me to setup nightly builds for the transport module.

So now if anyone interested in writing transports for Axis2 , or if you have already written any transport its time to add them to transport project.

XML tool to manage XML documents through a Fluent Interface

2008-09-15T10:52:00.000-07:00

"XMLTool is a very simple Java library to be able to do all sorts of common operations with an XML document. As a Java developer, I often end up writing the always the same code for processing XML, transforming, ... So i decided to put all in a very easy to use class using the Fluent Interface pattern to facilitate XML manipulations."

http://code.google.com/p/xmltool/

It seems to me that the API is very simple and easy , if we can get somewhat similar API for Apache Axiom that would be great!

WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP 2.0 Released

2008-09-12T05:58:00.000-07:00

WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP (WSO2 WSF/PHP), is an open source,enterprise grade, PHP extension for providing and consuming Web Services in PHP.WSO2 WSF/PHP is a complete solution for building and deploying Web services and is the only PHP extension with the widest range of WS-* specification implementations. It's Key features include, secure services and clients with WS-Security support, binary attachments with MTOM, automatic WSDL generation (code first model), WSDL mode for both services and clients (contract first model) and interoperability with .NET and J2EE.


You can download the release from:
http://wso2.org/downloads/wsf/php

Project home page:
http://wso2.org/projects/wsf/php

------------
Key Features
============

1. Client API to consume Web services
     * WSMessage class to handle message level options
     * WSClient class with both one way and two way service invocation
support
     * Option of using functions in place of object oriented API with
ws_request

2. Service API to provide Web services
     * WSMessage class to handle message level options
     * WSService class with support for both one way and two way operations
     * Option of using functions in place of object oriented API with
ws_reply

3. Attachments with MTOM
     * Binary optimized
     * Non-optimized (Base64 binary)

4. WS-Addressing
     * Version 1.0
     * Submission

5. WS-Security
     * UsernameToken and Timestamp
     * Encryption
     * Signing
     * WS-SecurityPolicy based configuration
     * WS-Secure Conversation

6. WS-Reliable Messaging
     * Single channel one way and two way reliable messaging

7. WSDL Generation for Server Side
     * WSDL generation based on annotations and function signatures, and
       serving on ?wsdl or ?wsdl2 requests

8. WSDL mode support for both client and server side
     * Write services and client based on a given WSDL
     * WS-Addressing and WS-SecurityPolicy is supported in WSDL mode
     * MTOM is now supported with WSDL mode

9. REST Support
     * Expose a single service script both as SOAP and REST service

10. Provide easy to use classes for common services
     * Consume some well known services such as Yahoo search and Flickr
       and Amazon services using predefined classes

11. wsdl2php.php script. This script can generate PHP classes for services
   and clients for a given WSDL to be used with WSDL Mode .

12. Data Services API
   PHP Data Services API that enables exposing database queries as web
services.
  

--------------------------------
Major Changes Since Last Release
================================
* Added PKCS12 Keystore Support
* Added Secure Conversation Support
* Added Replay Detection Support
* Contract First Web Services support for MTOM
* SWA ( Soap With Attachments ) Support added
* MTOM Attachment caching support added
* HTTP Chunking support added
* REST API Improved to support HTTP verbs GET,DELETE,PUT and POST
* New PHP Data Services Solution
* WS-RM 1.1 added
* Many Bug Fixes

-------------------
Reporting Problems
===================
Issues can be reported using the public JIRA available at:
       https://wso2.org/jira/browse/WSFPHP

The Evolution of a Programmer

2008-09-08T08:34:00.000-07:00

I recently encounter this interesting entry.

High School/Jr.High
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 END

First year in Collegeprogram Hello(input, output)

    begin
    writeln('Hello World')
  end.

Senior year in College

  (defun hello
  (print
    (cons 'Hello (list 'World))))

Read the full story here

Downloading Google Chrome from Mozilla FireFox

2008-09-02T18:04:00.000-07:00

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.

Google plans to launch Web browser

2008-09-01T17:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Web Service Discovery using Search engines

2008-09-01T10:44:00.000-07:00

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

Google adds for my name

2008-08-29T17:42:00.000-07:00

Today I searched for my name (Deepal Jayasinghe) in google , then I found that google adds appearing. I was so surprise to see that , because I can not understand why someone buy my name and put theire adds. Have a look at the figure below .

Spring Web services with Axis2 – WSF-Spring 1.5 release

2008-08-29T07:01:00.000-07:00

WSF-Spring is Axis2 integration into Spring framework. So you can use the power of Axis2 while you are in spring  environment. So this is simply a way of using Spring web services with Axis2.


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

IntelliJ IDEA 8: Beyond Java

2008-08-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

An interesting interview with Dmitry Jemerov, development lead at JetBrains. Its all about a powerful Java IDE we all love to use :)

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/08/intellij_8_M1

10 fundamental differences between Linux and Windows

2008-08-27T06:33:00.000-07:00

There is a very interesting article in Linuxtoday web site. There Jack Wallen has pointed out 10 fundamental differences between Windows and Linux operating systems. I think its worth reading the full story , though I have listed the 10 point which he discussed.

Full access vs. no access
Licensing freedom vs. licensing restrictions
Online peer support vs. paid help-desk support
Full vs. partial hardware support
Command line vs. no command line
Centralized vs. noncentralized application installation
Flexibility vs. rigidity
Fanboys vs. corporate types
Automated vs. nonautomated removable media
Multilayered run levels vs. a single-layered run level

Irrespective of whether I agree to above points or not , I am still a windows user [sometime I use Ubuntu too :) ]

Apache Axis2 1.4.1 Released

2008-08-25T14:49:00.000-07:00

Axis2 team is proud to announce the release of Apache Axis2 version
1.4.1. Apache Axis2 1.4.1 fixes a security vulnerability present in
Apache Axis2 1.4 policy processing.

Downloads are available at:
http://ws.apache.org/axis2/download.cgi

The Maven2 main repository has the latest jars as well.

Apache Axis2 is a complete re-design and re-write of the widely used
Apache Axis engine and is a more efficient, more
scalable, more modular and more XML-oriented Web services framework. It
is carefully designed to support the easy
addition of plug-in "modules" that extend its functionality for features
such as security and reliability.

Known Issues and Limitations in 1.4.1 Release:
- - Please see JIRA for the current status of bugs

We welcome any and all feedback at:
- - axis-user@ws.apache.org (please include "[axis2]" in the subject,
please subscribe first)
- - axis-dev@ws.apache.org (please include "[axis2]" in the subject,
please subscribe first)
- - http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AXIS2

Web services class at Georgia Tech

2008-08-21T16:58:00.000-07:00

Today I got a very valuable chance to teach a graduate class at Georgia Tech , it is interesting because I am just starting my graduate classes this fall . It was a guest lecture about Web services and Axis2. Professor Calton Pu , has to attend a conference so he requested me to do a guest lecture in his class today. I know teaching Axis2 is not such a difficult task for me , because most of the time I live with Axis2. But teaching a graduate class was bit of challenge for me , and second it made me somewhat nervous because that was the first time I did a lecture in a university. Anyway I believe I tried my best to make it simple , since the class consist of people from different areas. Teaching Web services to graduate who is doing research on Robotics or Multimedia is kind of dull job , its not there interest area.

All members of initial Axis2 team are now in US

2008-08-18T16:25:00.000-07:00

It is almost four years we have started Axis2 , withing this small time period Axis2 has became the de-factor Java Web service framework. A number of large companies uses Axis2 in production , while well know universities are using Axis2 for various research purposes. Regardless of the usage of Axis2 , when we start Axis2 there were only five full time people working on the project. Which included , Srinath Perera , Eran Chinthaka , Ajith Ranabahu, Chathura Herath and myself. We all did our best to make what we were doing a great product. And now we can happy we have done something useful.

The most important thing is all of the initial people who wrote Axis2 , are now doing their graduate studies in USA. I personally consider that as a great achievement as far a project is concerned. Now Axis2 is a rich project with hundred of developers , let's wait and see how many more people from Axis2 will come to do the graduate studies.

Guide to Performance and Runtime JVM Monitoring

2008-08-18T07:32:00.000-07:00

Eugene Ciurana has written a very useful article whoever working in high performance computing.

Read full story

Send and receive binary data with Axis2

2008-08-08T16:23:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote an article explaining how to use binary data support with Axis2. That mostly covers the writing binary aware service.

See the complete article

Feel the taste of Rules with Axis2 – Rule Services

2008-07-22T02:59:00.000-07:00

As I always tell , Axis2 architecture is so flexible , so you can do almost anything with Axis2. We have a number of extension for Axis2, such as

Data base extension
JavaScript extension
JRuby extension
Jython extension
Shell script extension and so on

Not stopping from there , we recently add one more extension to Axis2. Which is deploying “Rule services” in Axis2. We support most of the Rule engine , and you can configure your rule services to the rule engine you want and deploy that in Axis2 or WSO2 WSAS. As an example you can deploy Drools with this extension.

We have created a demo and hosted that in my home directory , and which has all the instruction you need to try the service. Try that and give us the feedback so that we can improve that and build complete Rule Service extension on Axis2.

Demo link : http://ww2.wso2.org/~deepal/drule/

Beauty and power of JavaScript – WSO2 Mashup server

2008-07-21T22:13:00.000-07:00

WSO2 Mashup server is a web services application server which has tuned to deploy JavaScripts as web services. Which is also build on WSO2 WSAS (which is in fact built on Apache Axis2). In addition to the WSAS , Mashup sever also uses WSO2 Registry.

With WSO2 Mashup sever we can deploy JS as Web services , as well as invoke any service from JS client. In addition to this it has a number of cool features as well.

WSO2 Mashup team did their 1.5 release recently , you can try that out. It is totally free and release under Apache License.

==================================================================

The WSO2 Mashup Server is a powerful yet simple and quick way to tailor Web-based information to the personal needs of individuals and organizations. It has been
released under the Apache Software License 2.0.

This release can be downloaded from http://wso2.org/projects/mashup

WSO2 Mashup Server 1.5 - Release Note - 21st July 2008
======================================================================
"Create, deploy, and consume Web services Mashups in the simplest fashion"

The WSO2 Mashup Server is a powerful yet simple and quick way to tailor
Web-based information to the personal needs of individuals and organizations.
It is a platform for acquiring data from a variety of sources including
Web Services, HTML pages, feeds and data sources, and process and combine it
with other data using JavaScript with E4X XML extensions. The result is then
exposed as a new Web service with rich metadata and artifacts to simplify the
creation of rich user interfaces.

The WSO2 Mashup Server will form the backbone of a become an ecosystem of
community-developed services that will broaden the palette of capabilities
for mashups and distributed applications.

WSO2 Mashup Server is released under the Apache License v2.0

Check out the project home page at http://www.wso2.org/projects/mashup for
additional information.

--------------------------
Features List
==========================
* Hosting of mashup services written using JavaScript with E4X XML
extension
- Simple file based deployment model
* JavaScript annotations to configure the deployed services
* Auto generation of metadata and runtime resources for the deployed
mashups
- JavaScript stubs that simplify client access to the mashup service
- TryIt functionality to invoke the mashup service through a web
browser
- WSDL 1.1/WSDL 2.0/XSD documents to describe the mashup service
- API documentation
* Ability to bundle a custom user interface for the mashups
* Many useful Javascript Host objects that can be used when writing mashups
- WSRequest: invoke Web services from mashup services
- File: File storage/manipulation functionality
- System: Set of system specific utility functions
- Session: Ability to share objects across different service
invocations
- Scraper: Extract data from HTML pages and present in XML format
- APPClient: Atom Publishing Protocol client to retrieve/publish Atom
            feeds with APP servers
- Feed: A generic set of host objects to transparently read and
create Atom
       and RSS feeds
- Request: Ability get information regarding a request received
* Support for recurring and longer-running tasks
* Support for service lifecycles
* Ability to secure hosted mashups using a set of commonly used security
scenarios
* Management console to easily manage the mashups
* Simple sharing of deployed mashups with other WSO2 Mashup Servers
* Mashup sharing community portal (http://mooshup.com) to share and host
your
mashups


--------------------------
New In This Release
==========================
* Request object
* Ability to secure hosted mashups using a set of commonly used security
scenarios
* Ability to call secured services using the WSRequest host object
* Integrated Data Services Support (expose data locked up in DataBases,
Excel spreadsheets and
CSV files with ease)
* OpenID login support
* Apache Shindig powered, Google compatible, per-user Dashboard and
browser based editor support
for developing gadgets for hosted mashups (http://wso2.org/library/3813).

-------------------------
Known Issues
=========================
* Management Console was tested only on IE 6/7 & Firefox 1.5/2.0/3.0.
* Inter-service dependencies using the dynamically generated stubs may
give
deployment time errors. Workaround would be to save a local copy of the
stub
in to the dependent service.
* JSON support lacks try-it support
* Mashup editor will convert < and > characters to <> while
saving the code in the
server. This might result in malformed xml. Using these special
characters with caution is adviced.
Refer http://wso2.org/jira/browse/MASHUP-607.
* Built-in samples cannot be secured - the built-in "sample" user does
not have a keystore associated with it
(system services use the keystore of the primary account.)

---------------------------------
Future Directions
=================================
* Improved tooling support.
* An expanded toolkit of generic building-block services.
* Deep registry integration including governance, rollback, dependency
analysis, etc.
* Lots more cool stuff.

------------------------
Reporting Problems
========================

Issues can be reported using the public JIRA available at
https://wso2.org/jira/browse/MASHUP


------------------------
Contact us
========================

WSO2 Mashup Server developers can be contacted via mailing lists:
For Users: mashup-user@wso2.org
For Developers: mashup-dev@wso2.org
For details on subscriptions: http://www.wso2.org/projects/mashup#mail

Questions can also be raised in this forum: http://www.wso2.org/forum/226

Now wouldn't it be nice to have WS02 integrated on our web hosting service rather than going through shell. Maybe in the future this will be an option.

WSO2 Web Services Framework for Perl 1.1 Released

2008-07-21T04:59:00.000-07:00

WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP (WSO2 WSF/Perl), is an open source,
enterprise grade, Perl extension for providing and consuming Web
Services in Perl.  WSO2 WSF/Perl is a complete solution for consuming
Web services  and is the only Perl extension with the widest range of
WS-* specification implementations.  It's Key features include, clients
with WS-Security support, binary attachments with MTOM.

You can download the release from:
http://wso2.org/downloads/wsf/perl

Project home page:
http://wso2.org/projects/wsf/perl


------------
Key Features
============

1. Client API to consume Web services
     * WSMessage class to handle message level options
     * WSClient class with both one way and two way service invocation
support

2. Attachments with MTOM
     * Binary optimized
     * Non-optimized (Base64 binary)

3. WS-Addressing
     * Version 1.0
     * Submission

4. WS-Security 
     * UsernameToken and Timestamp 
     * Encryption
     * Signing
     * WS-SecurityPolicy based configuration

5. WS-Reliable Messaging
     * Single channel two way reliable messaging

6. REST Support
     * Expose a single service script both as SOAP and REST service


-------------------
Reporting Problems
===================
Issues can be reported using the public JIRA available at:
       https://wso2.org/jira/browse/WSFPERL

Scripting support with Axis2

2008-07-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

As we all know Apache Axis2 is a Java based Web service framework. In addition to that Axis2 is becoming as the de facto Java based Web service framework. Which is obvious when we look at the number of daily downloads as well as a number of companies who use Axis2. It took about four years to come to this position with great support from the community.

Now we can find a number of scripting languages which run on JVM. If a scripting language is running on the JVM then we can easily write scripting extension to Axis2. At the moment Axis2 has scripting extensions for;

Groovy
Java Script (WSO2 Mashup server)
JRuby support
Jython support

Meaning of language extension is , one can deploy scripting services in Axis2 as well as one can use scripting language to invoke or access a service deploy in anywhere.

With the Axis2 architecture , we can easily plug a new language extension. It is just a matter of writing few components and registry in Axis2.

Deployer – to process the scripting file and create a Web service from that
Schema generator – Generating schema from the scripting class , for example if we are deploying a JS file , then generate corresponding WSDL
Message Receiver – when a message receive for that particular service , it will first come to the message receiver and that will invoke the scripting class and send the response if any.

Registering an extension in Axis2 is just a matter of adding your custom deployer in to axis2.xml.

If you're getting a new host, don't forget to check your hosting service if it supports Axis2.

Spring Web services and Axis2

2008-07-14T22:07:00.000-07:00

As you know Axis2 is a Web service framework which has support many things. It has support for scripting languages , it has support for data services and it has support for EJB , Corba and etc. In addition that since a long time it has support for Spring as well. With that you can deploy Spring bean as Web services in Axis2. Yes I agree it is yet another way of getting the thing done. I also realized that is not enough for spring developers. They need everything works on spring.

To solve that in WSO2 we came up with a solution where we have integrated Axis2 into Spring. When doing this we have convert all the axis2 configurations files into bean descriptors , for example we came up with a set of beans for axis2.xml. With this we have integrated Axis2 smoothly into Spring. After thing anyone can easily expose a bean as a Web service. And get the power of all the other WS* support , such as security , reliability etc. , above all you can get the power of Axis2 while you are in spring container.

With this approach you can make a bean into a Web service just using following line of codes

You can read more about Spring support from the following links

WSO2 Web Services Framework for Spring

Hello World with WSO2 WSF/Spring

Announcing: New Google C++ Testing Framework

2008-07-13T22:08:00.000-07:00

The folks at Google have recently open-sourced their xUnit-based testing framework for C++ development. The framework is said by project developer Zhanyong Wan to have been in use internally at Google for years by thousands of their C++ developers.

Read the full story

Multiple source directories with maven2

2008-07-13T21:13:00.000-07:00

Without any doubt I can tell that Maven and Maven2 are very powerful project management tool, specially very useful for project building.

As I remember correct in maven1 it had a way to add multiple source directories , however when I switch to maven2 , I found that it does not have support for multiple source directories by default. Recently I got the requirement of adding multiple source directories for WSO2 Registry sample module. That module has few sub directories and I do not need to treat them as module. What I wanted was to add them as source directories in the sample module. So when I do the googling I found a very cool maven pluging called “build-helper-maven-plugin” , which helps us to add multiple source directory to a single module.

Structure of the sample module is as follow;

samples
-- handler-sample
--src
-- filebased-sample
--src
-- wsdl-sample
-- src
-- collection-handler-sample
-- src
-- custom-ui-sample1
-- src

So the corresponding pluging configuration is as follows

<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>build-helper-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.1</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>add-source</id>
<phase>generate-sources</phase>
<goals>
<goal>add-source</goal>
</goals>
<configuration>
<sources>
<source>handler-sample/src</source>
<source>filebased-sample/src</source>
<source>wsdl-sample/src</source>
<source>collection-handler-sample/src</source>
<source>custom-ui-sample1/src</source>
</sources>
</configuration>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>

Failures in Agile Develoment

2008-07-11T01:46:00.000-07:00

As Agilists we love to talk about our successes but its much harder to talk about failure.

Read the full story

Apache ODE 1.2 Release

2008-07-10T23:11:00.000-07:00

The Apache ODE community is proud to announce its latest 1.2 release
that includes many new features, improvements and bug fixes. Apache ODE
is a WS-BPEL compliant web services orchestration engine. It organizes
web services calls following a process description written in the BPEL
XML grammar. Another way to describe it would be a web-service capable
workflow engine.

Highlights of this release:

* External variables: variables used in a process are not opaque to
the outside world anymore. You can map them to a simple database table
and manipulate them directly.
* Support for the WSDL HTTP binding. We've also added a few
extensions, allowing the invocation of REST-style web services.
* Advanced endpoint configuration which, thanks to the integration
with Apache Axis2, enables WS-Security and WS-RM support.
* A long list of small fixes and improvements for best-of-breed
stability, performance and usability.

In addition to these new features, Apache ODE provides the following
functionalities:

* Side-by-side support for both the WS-BPEL 2.0 OASIS standard and the
legacy BPEL4WS 1.1 vendor specification.
* Supports 2 communication layers: one based on Axis2 (Web Services
http transport) and another one based on the JBI standard (using
ServiceMix).
* High level API to the engine that allows you to integrate the core
with virtually any communication layer.
* Hot-deployment of your processes.
* Compiled approach to BPEL that provides detailed analysis and
validation at the command line or at deployment.
* Management interface for processes, instances and messages.

For more information, check the Apache ODE website: http://ode.apache.org/.

Apache ODE is an open source project released under a business-friendly
license (Apache License v2.0), as such we welcome all your help and
contributions. To participate and get involved, our mailing lists are
the best resources to start from: http://ode.apache.org/mailing-lists.html

SOA triple play: Policy meets Semantic Web

2008-07-10T01:18:00.000-07:00

Triples, a programming grammar developed by W3C for its Semantic Web initiative, is incorporated into WSO2's newly released Registry 1.1. The open source SOA vendor is moving toward a triples-based language that will allow users to encode their own governance rules and policies.

Full story

Google open-sources data exchange language

2008-07-09T21:33:00.000-07:00

"Google uses "thousands of different data formats to represent networked messages between servers, index records in repositories, geospatial datasets, and more," wrote Kenton Varda, a member of Google's software engineering team, in a blog post. "Most of these formats are structured, not flat. This raises an important question: How do we encode it all?""

Read full story.

Let's wait and see how we can use these in our applications .

SOA and Open source ESB

2008-07-08T22:36:00.000-07:00

As I have mentioned in my previous posts , SOA is becoming the next generation of the IT industry. Not only that Web services provide major contribution to that. Just having Web services does not make SOA complete. There are a number of factors which are necessary for making SOA complete , or moving company into so called SOA.

When a company want to move into Web services , one of the first thing they need to focus on is the web service framework they are going to use. There are number of good open source and commercial web services frameworks around , you can pick one which match with your requirement and then enable Web services in your company. If you are looking for an open source solution then Apache Axis2 would be a good candidate. I am not recommending Axis2 , since I am an Axis2 developer , but it so extensible , flexible as well as easy to use , above all it inteoperates with other open source and commercial web services stacks.

In one of my previous post I mentioned about one of the other key part of SOA , which is SOA registry. And recently I did a feature comparison on WSO2 registry as well as Mule Galaxy.

Next major component which make SOA complete is ESB or Enterprise Service Bus. There is no clear definition for ESB , different people have different opinions on that. In my view ESB is a bus which connect different kind of applications together and provide a way to talk to them in application independent manner. Web service provide right infrastructure for that providing SOAP based interaction. With ESB one can talk to different kind of applications and can connect different kind of applications. For example we can connect data service , main frames and messaging queue together using an ESB.

The requirement of ESB depends on the type of application you have , if you have just Web service application then you might not need an ESB, however if you have different kind of applications (say Java and non-Java applications) , then to connect such application we need an ESB.

There are a number of ESB out there , and you can find both commercial and open source ESBs. It is not surprise to see that open source ESB performs better than some of the commercial ESBs. WSO2 recently did a performance comparison , you can read them and make your decision. In Apace domain , there are two ESBs , Apache Synapse and Apache ServiceMix.

Apache Synapse (or WSO2 ESB) is built on Axis2 and ServiceMix is built on CXF. I like Apache synapse due to few reasons , first it is built on Axis2. Second I was able to write the very first synapse toy based on the current architecture , third it seems to be the fastest ESB.

Axis2 based open source Application server – WSO2 WSAS

2008-07-06T23:50:00.000-07:00

There are different types of application severs , not only that when we say Application server , then the default meaning is J2EE application server. Then how about Apache Tomcat ? , well we all tell it is also an application server. Then what is WSO2 WSAS , is it an application sever , yes which is also an application sever , however the difference is rather than deploying generic applications (web applications) , it allows us to deploy a particular type of application. Which is web services.

WSAS stands for Web Services Application Server , as I mentioned earlier which is a sever where we can deploy Web service. I know Axis2 is very flexible and easy to use Web services framework. Not like Axis1 , getting stuff done with Axis2 is very easy as well. If we want Reliable messaging , then its just a matter of coping Sandesha mar and deploy that , same for the security as well. You do not need to have any global configurations.

Then why do we need WSO2 WSAS ?

The answer to that questions is very simple , if you download Axis2 then you only get Axis2 or Web service support. Then how about if you want to enable security of reliability , then you have to download those libraries and configure. When it comes to WSAS , it has done all those for you. Not only that it provides a very nice UI to configure one of the very difficult and complex part in Web services , which is WS-Policy.

If we look at the features of WSAS , we can find a number of thing , but among those there are few features which I really like as Axis2 developer.

Run time transport configuration – WSAS allows you to add , stop and run transport at the runtime
Clustering support – Which has very good support for both context replications (action associate with context hierarchy) and description management (action associates with description hierarchy such as AxisService , AxisOperation and etc ).
Message logging – We can easily turn of turn on the message logging and see what are the message going here and there. This is really cool and handy for the transports other than HTTP.
Code generation with maven build file – I found this is really cool , because when we give the WSDL it generates the code , compile that and generate a maven file. So that I can just run that and get the job done.
Data service support – With WSAS we can easily expose a database as a Web service

Well there are many more features that you might find useful for you. If you are an Axis2 user try with WSAS as well , that might help you to reduce some of the work you do with Axis2.

WSO2 WSAS became Products of the Year 2007

Scaling Java EE Applications

2008-07-06T22:56:00.000-07:00

Wang Yu , has written a very interesting and useful article about the Java EE application scalability and their issues.

"If an application is useful, then the network of users will grow crazily fast at some point. As more and more mission-critical applications are now running on Java EE, many Java developers are caring about scalability issues. However, most of popular Web 2.0 sites are built with script languages, and there are a lot of voices to doubt the scalability of Java Applications. In this article, Wang Yu takes real world cases as examples to explain ways on how to scale Java applications based on his experiences on the laboratory projects, and at the same time, bring together practice, science, algorithms, frameworks, and experience on failed projects, to help readers on building high scalable Java applications."

See the full article

Why companies are reluctant to use Open source

2008-07-03T21:35:00.000-07:00

One thing is obvious that the future of software is nothing but open source. Time has come to the point where ability of competing with open source products is not an easy task anymore (to whom ? ) . Knowing this fact most of the well know companies are either moving to open source , making their source open , contribute to open source projects , or acquire open source companies.

If we look at the todays market it is obvious that the open source has more than enough influence in the industry as well as it has gained the recognizing , there are the people who decide the future of the industry. To get the idea more clear let's have a look at some of the well know open source projects

Apache Web server – no doubt which is most famous Web server
Apache tomcat – Application server , we all know and we all use
Linux and Ubuntu – World famous open source operating systems
Eclipse – Widely used Java IDE
Open office – We all use open office
And many more ....

I know I can name dozens of products , but which is not the idea of this post.

There was a myth saying that “do not use open source , since no support” , do you think this is true anymore ? If so you think so than you are wrong. Now we can find companies doing open source consultants , services and supports , so no need to worry about the support. In addition to that if you look at the mailing list you can see the level of supports you get. For example if you look at the Axis2 and Synapse mailing list you will realize the difference, not only on those two list most of the Apache mailing list are so active and you can get very good support.

In addition to that from one of the mailing list I saw that someone is telling that the level of support he got is much more better than the support he gets from a commercial product. This is just an example for you to understand the trend.

Yes , I agree there is a mindset that some of the people have that the open source products are not good and not in the right quality. They always want to use the products from well known companies. The reason is they only trust the projects from those companies. IMO which is also a myth , the reason I am telling this is , if we look at an open source project which has a very good community. And all most all the time that community is consisting with very well know personality in a particular area. So the out come of that is obvious. Even the quality is good and always projects meets the standards , and might intemperate with other open source projects as well as commercial projects.

When we look at the level of support , quality of the products , number of features , meets of standards , there is no single reason not to use open source. Sometime you can use some of the projects without getting any support. Because you can find very comprehensive documentations about the projects , if you have any problem you can read and understand easily. In addition to that project like Apache Web server , Apache tomcat , Apache Axis2 are matured projects and number of people use the projects is countless.

Nothing to worry , no need to reluctant about open source. Use it , help it , contribute it and benefit from that.

Future is open source !!!!

Seven Reasons to Move to Linux

2008-07-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

Linux is a great solution for small business customers because it helps them avoid high licensing costs, viruses, vendor lock-in, hardware upgrades and unstable servers and desktops.

See the full story.

Open source competition - Mule Galaxy vs WSO2 Registry

2008-07-02T04:36:00.000-07:00

Competition is everywhere , it does not matter whether commercial or open source different people tries to compete with others. Not only in different domains , in same domain as well. If we look at in Apache there are two well know Web services frameworks (Axis2 and CXF) , and there are two Enterprises Services Buses (ESB) (Synapse and ServiceMix) . Those are just simple examples for the competition we have in same domain. As I mentioned in one my previous blog , open source is a social activity. Therefore better the quality of the product , then thats good for the end users. So in my view having competition is very good even among the open source vendors.

WSO2 released its Registry/Repository product in recently , in the mean time Mule source released their Registry/Repository product in few days back. So yesterday I download Mule galaxy and play with and went through its feature page. Then I realized that both the implementation are doing all most the same thing , almost the same manner.

So I started to write a blog yesterday doing a comparison between WSO2 registry and Mule Galaxy , unfortunately it become a too long , so rather than writing everything in my blog I wrote and publish an article. Have a look at the features of the two products and see which one suit for you.

Read more about that .

Web future and Semantic Web

2008-07-02T03:00:00.000-07:00

Semantic Web is around in the field for few years and most of the well know universities are doing research on the filed of semantic Web. Among them universities like MIT , UMBC have done very good progress as well. Though it is around for that many years I do not see that much adaption in the industry , one reason could be it is still in the research level.

When I was doing some reading on the semantic web I found a few very useful documents.

A presentation by Prof Tim Berners-Lee .
The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. You can think of the Semantic Web as an efficient way to represent data on the World Wide Web, or as a database that is globally linked, in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web. Semantic technologies represent meaning using ontologies and provide reasoning through the relationships, rules, logic, and conditions represented in those ontologies. Read more
Some serious computer scientists, although cautious about the promise of the Semantic Web, are ultimately optimistic that it will be everything developers are hoping for -- an online source for all of the knowledge humanity has created in science, business and the arts Read more

Open source development and IntelliJ IDEA

2008-06-30T23:04:00.000-07:00

When I start to learn Java first thing I use was notepad , I wrote the program in the notepad compile and run. Actually that helped a lot to learn most of the code quality there , however one of the issue was I it took more time to do a simple task. The problem become worse when we want to debug something.

After that I started to use Jbuilder when I move to that I realized the power of using an IDE to develop Java applications. It saves most of our time on importing and debugging. While I was using Jbuilder I started to use IntelliJ IDEA (Thank Ajith for pointing to that), then I realized the power of that tool. In my personal view it is the best IDE I have ever used. And I should say I have addicted to IDEA , if it is Java development the only IDE I like is IntelliJ IDEA.

Luckily I am an open source software developer so I can get an IDEA license free , so for me IDE is free. And I should not forget to say thanks to jetbrains for giving us free license.

There are a number of reasons I like IDEA over other IDEs.

First thing it saves most of my times , time is very important for me so a minute is also important for me. I do not want to waste my time unnecessary setting up projects and adding libraries. When it comes to IDEA it is great.
Debugging – I have never seen an IDE which has that much of support for debugging. Code debugging is very important for me. It has a number of options we can use to debug the code. That helps me in two ways , first it saves my time , second it provide more than what I want to do my job.
Support for multiple modules – Since I am working on a projects (Axis2) which has a number of modules so it helps me a lot. (I know some other IDE has this feature)
Starting Applications severs and remote debugging– When I develop web applications this feature help me a lot.
Code formatting – It format the file according to the type , for example Java files according to the Java template , Xml as XML document
Code analyzing – No matter how good we write code , there may be some problems and issues with the code we write. IDEA code analyzer help me to find out the issues with the code we write, cyclic dependencies , code duplicate and etc.

I know there are much more useful features than I have mentioned here , but above are the most frequent features I use in my day to day life.

One last thing to note here is that the idea of this entry is not to market any IDE , but to tell my personal opinion about that.

Few other blogs about their IDEs

Ten Fantastic Keyboard Shortcuts in OpenOffice.org

2008-06-30T03:06:00.000-07:00

Since most of us use Openoffice I think knowing the following shortcuts will be really helpful.

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/ten_fantastic_keyboard_shortcuts_openoffice_org

Real open source development

2008-06-29T22:07:00.000-07:00

Open source software development can be considered as a social activity , because whoever develop the product give away free, therefore the society is benefited from that. In my opinion the definition of open source software development is a controversial topic , and different people have different definitions for it as well. However I see open source software development as a community driven activity. All the decisions are taken by the community , and all the development also done by the community. A community can be consists of individual, organization or companies , irrespective of who they are when it come to open source there is no hierarchy as such. Everyone in the same level , in one stage everyone become architectures , in one stage everyone become developers , and it some other stage everyone become tech writers and so on.

Now let's look at actors of open source projects , to get the idea clear let me take Apache Axis2 as a sample projects. We can classified actors or contributors into following category.

Designers – whoever helped to design the project
Developers – People who developed the projects
Testers – Users who test the product and give feedback
Users – Whoever use the project , product become useless if they can not find users who use the projects
Trainers and consultants – People who conduct training on the product , who spread the word about the project and teach others how to use the projects
Tech writer – People who writes articles , book , papers and etc.. , telling how to use the projects

Most of the above category are interrelated , and helped to bring the project forward. And all those people are need in order to improve the project as successful project. Sometimes single person belong to one or all of the above category.

Just having the community around and keeping the source open does not mean the project is open source. The community should allow different people to carry out different activities. In other word if some one want to do training on Axis2 then that should be possible irrespective of whether he is a developer or not.

And the community should not be driven by an individual or a single company , it should be a community. It is essential to listen to other people and other companies. That is the key factor behind success of an open source project. Not like a proprietary project , open source project may have opinions from a number of different people , sometime all those are leaders in particular area. So thats help a lot to improve the quality and outcome of the product.

When I consider about the open source license I really like the Apache License because it gives the full freedom to the end user to do whatever he wants with the code. He can get the code modified as they wish and do whatever they want with that, may be release as open source or sell.

Moving Apache ODE into maven

2008-06-27T04:02:00.000-07:00

These days I am using Apache ODE (open source BPEL implementation) heavily to provide the ability to deploy BPEL services in Axis2. As I mentioned previously in my blog I got what I want working fine. However having that is not enough I need to write a build system for the component I wrote. When doing so one of the major challenge I faced was getting maven2 working with Apache ODE. I agree they have all the artifacts in the maven repo , but adding other dependencies is a challenge.

One of the issue behind this is ODE does not uses build system like maven, so the projects depends on Apache ODE have to a high amount of work to get the work done. Not only that since ODE is not having build system they can not give us the nightly builds too , so we can not add the project dependencies to ODE snapshots.

Considering all those I think , it would be good Apache ODE can move into maven2. If they want I can definitely help for that.