Month: December 2009

Time for family and friends, Time to party and time to relax :D

Today I got holidays. 😀 yeah I know some of you might be wondering whether am still schooling (Yeah I got the same feeling first lol) !!! !@#$%^& But yeah we got a super awesome two whole weeks to have some fun, go some where, anywhere out from checking mail, and doing the stuff we do day to day. Had the last-office-day party at flag and whistle dressed up like pirates, doing some crazy games and enjoying nice food. Dr. Sanjiva gave an inspiring speech, talked about what we achived as a team at WSO2 in 2009 and what we should do in the coming year.

I am still 5 months old at WSO2 and all these things inspires me, the friendly open culture (with a very Geeky backdrop), the challenging work, friendly people with an amazing passion and team work. All those make me think how great it is to be apart of it all. So now its holidays for us, till Jan 4th we take a break from work and enjoy with everything else but work. My plan is to sleep about two days, Going on a trip to North (Yeah north since there NO WAR any more) for like 3 ~ 4 days, visit some old friends and la..di..da..di..da… 🙂 So yeah until then HAPPY HOLIDAYS

WSO2 Gadget Server is out… Download it !! Play with it !!

Yesterday (16th Dec) WSO2 Gadget Server graduated from its beta status and announced its release. WSO2 Gadget Server is designed to serve as a presentation middle-ware product in the SOA space to smoothly display chunks of service oriented data for the end users.

The solution architecture is based on portal / portlet concept but making it far more simpler. Since the enterprises are more and more leaning towards the cloud and service oriented mashups, visualizing those data should not be complicated. Hence the Gadget Server provides a simple platform to write the data visualization code just in HTML, JavaScript and XML the implementation of the presentation logic cannot make more simpler. It is exactly similar to writing a Google gadget (hosted in iGoogle / Gmail / orkut) to Tweet ;).

As far as it goes the Gadget Server’s applicability for the enterprise is somewhat an enterprise dashboard that can be customized according to the user’s need and governed by the authorities. For an instance if you are a manager of a bank, wouldn’t it be great to have a dashboard forecasting and displaying current and future bank transaction stats and predications, while at the same time in a deferent view having your business schedule, calender, mail/IM, and news as small but clear and interactive portlets.

Yeah so thats, what the Gadget Server does, and the interesting fact is, its simplicity and extensibility, What all you need to know is some HTML and JavaScript. (no need to consult Java / .NET / PHP / SOA experts). So Download it !! Play with it !! Give us some feedback !!

Authoring, deploying and using XML Gadgets in WSO2 Gadget Server

We are about to release The long awaited WSO2 Gadget Server within few days of time. These few days I was doing some documentation and content writing about the Gadget Server, Apache Shindig and Google gadgets specification. My 1st article about authoring gadgets is now published on WSO2 Oxygen Tank as a help/Tutorial for Gadget server users. You can also download the Gadget Server release candidate 2 and play with it. Also Paul had written an interesting article about portals and Gadgets Server’s role.

Apache Shindig talk at Apache Con Asia 09

As I have mentioned in some previous post, today I did a talk about Apache shindig and its use cases (WSO2 Gadget Server) at Apache Con 09 with my Colleague Tyrell. So without writing about the whole talk let me share the presentation slides. The Talk turned up great, audience were quite interested, too bad we had very limited time and missed to do a demo. 😦

http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=shindig-apachecon-asia-09-091204001804-phpapp02&stripped_title=shindig-apachecon-asia-09

View more documents from Nuwan Bandara.

Apache Asia Road Show 2009 >> Keynote speech

Today I was at Apache Asia road show 2009 at Colombo, and feeling good about myself of attending :). It was a great session with many valuable tech talks and more of a valuable community gathering. Am not writing this post to talk about Apache and all the open source movement but about a specific talk which made me thinking.

Today, the 1st of 3 days event, the keynote speech was given by a remarkable Sri Lankan Scientist Prof Mohan Munasinghe on a topic if I remember correctly, “Making Development More Sustainable Will Help Address Climate Change“. I know !! It doesn’t sound much like open source or rather ICT in that matter, but the way he made most of the things related to ICT was quite remarkable. His solution to address bigger problems seems simple. His solution was to address the small problems, change the things what you can change at no cost, exactly quoting “Use electricity carefully, eat less meet :)”.

Thinking it through, its the old method in solving the big problem, its just break it in to small problems and try to solve those small ones. The facts Prof Munasinghe talked about climate change was quite terrifying. But however his conclusion was optimistic, he believed as a community that we will stand up against these challenges, be less greedy and help the poor.

P.S : If anyone of you did find the presentation slides of the keynote speech please do link in comments 🙂

That and This

Nothing much new to write, was busy with work, WSO2 Gadget Server is about to release in the coming weeks, (I’ll be writing a whole story about it in a coming post). Apart from all those, my first article was published today in the diGIT magazine, which is a free online IT magazine run by a bunch of Sri Lankans. For some time I wanted to write about SOA and my findings in my final academic year, I thought I will blog about it. But never got a chance or rather, who will read about SOA in my blog :D. For many of such reasons I thought of contributing to diGIT mainly about SOA. With its December issue, my first article about SOA got published. you can check it out at http://digit.lk/09_dec_soa2 and leave a comment here 🙂

Other than that, The Apache Asia Roadshow 2009 is happening in town Dec. 3rd, 4th and 5th. On 4th morning I will be talking about Apache Shindig and our experience in WSO2 Gadget Server along with Tyrell. So pay a visit on the event am sure it’ll be awesome.