The WSO2 Mashup Server 0.2 release is now available for download!  Right on schedule three months after our 0.1 release.

As I said on the advent of the 0.1 release, the approach we’ve taken to the Web Service composition space is simple:

• Provide a platform for easy invocation of Web Services from within a JavaScript environment.  This enables you to grab data in XML format from a variety of Web Services and manipulate it fluidly, using XML as a native datatype courtesy of E4X support.
• Expose JavaScript functions as Web Service operations, complete with WSDL 2.0 or WSDL 1.1 and XML Schema descriptions, expose them through SOAP 1.2, SOAP 1.1, and REST, and generate a host of artifacts including Javascript/DOM and Javascript/E4X stubs, a try-it page, and so forth.
• Provide bridges to information not in strict Web Service format (e.g. described by WSDL), including at screen scraping tools (for HTML and other non-XML dialects), feeds (RSS and Atom), and files.

The end result is a scriptable Web Services composition platform.

We didn’t raise much noise around the 0.1 release, as we still were working on some of the fundamentals.  But I’m very proud of the 0.2 release and encourage you to give it a whirl.  This release marks major improvements in a number of areas:

• Revamped and expanded support for describing and converting types.
  • In addition to support for annotating a Javascript parameter with an XML Schema built-in types, the Javascript types themselves can be "declared".  We’ve developed mappings (and conversions) from Javascript types.
  • Support for declaring optional parameters.
  • Support for declaring repeated parameters (arrays).
  • Support for declaring enumerations.
  • Support for declaring simple object structures.
  • Run-time annotations of types enabling Javascript types to be serialized as XML and reconstituted at the client (in the absence of annotations.)
• Support for long running services, simple workflows, and periodic invocation based on simple and familiar browser scheduling constructs:
  • setTimeout()
  • setInterval()
• Improved ATOM/RSS and APP support
• Lots of bug fixes and improvements.

One area we didn’t do any innovation on was our user interface - which still has a number of useability and functionality issues.  We held off incremental improvements between 0.1 and 0.2 in order to focus on a significant revamp in 0.3.

I’ll be talking more about specific features and use cases of the WSO2 Mashup Server in weeks to come.