Today is the first full day of summer vacation in the Marsh household. Each of the kids have a few wonderfully empty days before our summer schedule kicks in, with travel, visitors, summer camp, and some fun summer school programs. Of course, for us fully-employed parents it just seems the work schedule hits full on during the summer.
With today’s economy though, full employment and security in your profession is increasingly rare. We know many people impacted by the downturn, looking for new opportunities both within their current position, and in far too many cases whole new professions.
We at WSO2 feel fortunate to be weathering the downturn well – although there’s nothing “cheap” about the way our software performs, the Open Source label has attracted many new customers that are looking for lower cost options.
WSO2 also has a strong tradition of community service within Sri Lanka, from regular fundraising for local charity groups to responding to the Tsunami and other disasters around the world with an open source disaster management system still going strong today. We wanted to help people caught in today’s global economic disaster in whatever small way we could.
 Introducing WSO2’s SOA Summer School.
WSO2 has put together an eight-week series of free online SOA training events, to help enterprise architects and developers acquire or hone their skills and become more valuable to their employers or prospective employers. The curriculum covers SOA architectural patterns, deployment patterns, security, governance, mashups, business process management, and much more. Check out the whole schedule and register at the WSO2 training site.
And the best part, is that the whole program is FREE. Our gift back to the global SOA community. So far the response has been fantastic!
This sure makes me proud to work at WSO2.
I don’t believe much in titles or org structures, having always been pretty independent (and remove from the halls of authority). But my title did recently get a title change, reflecting some of the change in my previous daily routine from aiding the evolution of the WSO Mashup Server.
Although I’m a bit embarrassed to use the veep title (lingering Pavlovian associations with Cheney?), I am proud that our whole software platform has matured to the point where we spend less time adding features to meet customer needs, and more time explaining that we have solutions ready to go, with great usability, performance, scalability, interoperability, and license terms (zero). And that our support services are top-notch and provide great value. It’s an honor to get this message out to our growing community of users, customers, and partners.
Congrats to Devaka too for his promotion from Manager to Director! Guess that’s what you get for consistently great work around the clock ;-).
Check out this little rough (and rather noisy) video I put together of a conversation from ZendCon 2008. Shankar observes the trend towards tying PHP applications together using Web Services, something for which the WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP is ideally suited. And we just announced the 2.0 release!
Keith has created a nice REST demo to show how WSDL 2.0 can be used to describe a RESTful interaction, and posted the resulting mashup here. This is in response to an old post he found from Stefan Tilkov.
One of the area Stefan explores is the difference between the conceptual models of "operations" versus "resources":
It seems to me that the right thing would be to get rid of the operations (or map them to the HTTP verbs, which is essentially the same thing as getting rid of them).
Keith indeed mapped each combination of "verb", "uri template" into a WSDL operation. So what Stefan describes as "GET on /customer/{id} - get customer details" Keith maps to a "getCustomerDetails" operation which takes an "id" parameter. I think this is a very reasonable mapping, and one that looks a lot like the "getCustomerDetails(id)" construct which is present in some form in every programming language.
I don’t call this "getting rid of the operations" either, if by that is meant writing a WSDL that has only four operations (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE). I would instead say that an operation encapsulates the combination of the http method, the http location uri pattern or template, and the input and output types into a construct that maps well to familiar programming constructs and provides a level of abstraction that can prove valuable (e.g. the uri location can change, security can be applied, even the transport protocols can change without perturbing the development experience).
Having a WSDL 2.0 description of the service in terms of operations also had the beneficial effect of documenting which combinations of verb/uri template are supported, with the effect of also documenting which combinations aren’t supported. Stefan had to notate these as "unused" in his diagram, important because some of the combinations aren’t obvious (why can’t a customer be deleted?)
It still baffles me why there isn’t more demand for WSDL 2.0 and its REST description features. Hopefully Keith’s post helps demonstrate the value of this technology.
Microsoft TechEd Online has posted a video taped in Orlando after our successful keynote appearance. This video captures a panel discussion that I participated in - I’ll just quote the blurb:
This Panel discussion centers around the use of standards to facilitate interoperability between different technologies. The participants have all implemented their own version of a reference application and speak about any challenges they faced in implementing the application. The main discussion points of this Panel include: interoperability through SOAP; WS-* standards and how they facilitate interoperability; common problems with interoperability; identity and security in a distributed application; and future directions/remaining challenges in interoperability. With Raghu Thiagarajan, Gerald Beuchelt, Gregory Leake, Jonathan Marsh, and Chris Haddad.
Watch the video here, or go here, search for "Industry Interoperability" and choose your playback format.
Related news: The video of our demo within the keynote has been extracted from the entire keynote and made available on youtube. Here’s the link!
 Microsoft, Google, and others have just launched the Information Card Foundation, to promote awareness and interoperability around InfoCards. This is great news - I think InfoCards have the potential to solve some real problems with managing identities and securing them against theft. Despite the client-side technology being available in Vista for a year plus, we’re still slow to see installations emerge in the marketplace. The only use I make of InfoCard (and then still pretty rarely) is in the WSO2 Mashup Server, which has both InfoCard and OpenId support (though you can use an old fashioned username/password).
Managing identity and security without complicating the user experience is still a challenge. I’m hoping the Information Card Foundation can encourage broadly useable solutions as it gets rolling. And I’m hoping some large properties (PayPal is a member) may actually start putting stronger identity management technologies in place on a broad scale.
It should be no surprise with our products supporting InfoCards and OpenId that WSO2 is now a member of both the Information Card Foundation and the OpenID Foundation.
Yes, you heard right. A few minutes ago in Orlando at TechEd IT 2008, Bob Muglia’s keynote included a demo of StockTrader 2.0, an SOA sample application consisting of a client application, a business process service layer, and an order processing service in order to place sample stock trades. Gregory Leake of Microsoft showed the application, with each of the three components built in .NET 3.5, and then I came on stage, representing WSO2, and we swapped out the WPF smart client for a PHP application based on the WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP. Then we swapped out the back end order processing service for a Java version hosted in the WSO2 Web Services Application Server. After each swap we placed a successful trade.
Watch the keynote here.
The demo featured the cross-platform interoperability between .NET, Java-based solutions, and unmanaged code solutions such as the PHP application. The Web Services used were completely secured with message-level security (WS-Security), and everything of course worked quite seamlessly.
You can download the WSO2 StockTrader 2.0 application as well, including PHP versions of the business service and the order processing service.
The good news in putting this demo together is that the wire-level interop worked pretty spectacularly out-of-the-box, just as the demo promotes. The actual interop between the three major development platforms in use today (CLR-based languages, JVM-based languages, and unmanaged code based at some level in C) is impressive, and while there is more work to do to complete and verify interop deeply across Security, Reliability, Transactions, and Policies, it really seems like the goal of making this stuff both universal and "just plumbing" is approaching pretty rapidly.
On another note - yesterday we were speculating backstage whether a keynote at a major Microsoft event had ever featured an Open Source partner on stage. None of us could think of any off the top of our heads. Can you? Were we the first?
Update: 10PM. Here’s the press release. And a news article, with a nice (and accurate!) quote from me. 
Seems the WSO2 crew has been blogging about WSO2 appearing on the "cool 5" companies in a recent Gartner report (paid subscribers only). What intrigued them about the WSO2 Mashup Server was support for the hitherto paradoxical "lightweight but enterprise-oriented" services.
And here I am a couple of days late. I guess for breaking news and the real skinny on "cool" you would do well to add the feeds of Paul, Sanjiva, Daniel, Glen, and Keith to your blogroll.
I’ve just arrived in Las Vegas for the Gartner Web Innovation and Open Source Summits. I’ll be hanging out with our new VP Bizdev Subbu Ayer, answering questions about our product line, and bending ears about my favorite subject - the WSO2 Mashup Server, which should experience it’s 0.2 release later this month. In the area? Drop by and say hi!
 Just posted - a WSO2 Oxygen Tank interview with yours truly on the intersection of Web Services and mashups, and a little high-level glimpse of what’s driving the design of the WSO2 Web Service Mashup Server.
Check it out!
 WSO2 today hosts the WS-Metadata Exchange Interop Workshop here in Auburn, California. Representatives from Microsoft, IBM, WSO2, Sun, Oracle, and Adobe are currently present, and already showing some initial progress at running the interop scenarios.
WS-Metadata Exchange is a fairly simple spec, allowing one to approach another service and query it about it’s capabilities (WSDL, XML Schema, WS-Policy). Having a common way to do some initial handshake allows services to bootstrap communication with each other. I think the most likely scenario for this is doing some alignment of security policies so that subsequent communications can be done in a secure fashion.
Update: As of Thursday, we had overall excellent interop results with most of the matrix filled in green. Still a few reds in the matrix between a few vendors that will hopefully get filled in next week. Overall, I think the meeting went very well and I think everyone enjoyed coming to the "WSO2 Auburn campus." Hopefully we can make this a regular occurrence!
 The WSO2 Oxygen Tank, hosting our open-source code, documentation, articles, mail forums, and so forth, also now hosts a series of podcasts, now including one by me. I spoke with Hasmin Abdulcader about the W3C Workshop on Web of Services for Enterprise Computing, reiterating some of the points in my previous blog post.
Also check out Jon Udell speaking with Steve Vinosky prior to the workshop - that’s much more insightful about the REST versus WS-* debate about which I don’t have a whole lot new to say at this point.
Photocredit - me trying to give the mic away at the Workshop by Paul Downey.
 WSO2 is hosting the WS-Metadata Exchange Interoperability Workshop, here in my hometown of Auburn, California. After years of travelling to the far corners of the world to attend meetings, this is the first time I’ve hosted a meeting I myself didn’t have to travel to (at Microsoft I hosted meetings at the Redmond and Silicon Valley campuses.)
If you’ve got a WS-Mex implementation, sign up and come along! We expect to be testing WSO2’s Mex implementation with the likes of Microsoft, and IBM. We’re sure to have a great time!
I find this kind of thing rather amusing. Makes me sound far more important than I am…
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