Month: January 2012

Events notification (presentation) using WSO2 technologies

The post is about creating a dashboard to display event notifications using few of WSO2 Technologies.

Requirement : Capture events from an event sender and display it in a dashboard

Used Technologies : WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus, WSO2 Application Server, WSO2 Gadget Server

Architecture : In brief, events are generated randomly, ESB will act as an event sink, and it will publish the events to the subscribed parties (to a service deployed in WSO2 AS). There is a gadget deployed in WSO2 Gadget Server where it will poll the received events from the service periodically.

HOWTO :

The ESB

At the ESB end we will have to set up the event sink as following,

https://gist.github.com/1653037.js?file=synapse.xml

Then you need to create a topic in the ESB and subscribe the created service. Steps in doing so is documented here

The Service

A very simple service to accumulate the events (this is not at all production grade, who whats to keep all the event in memory 😉 )

https://gist.github.com/1653077.js?file=TrafficEventReceiverService.java

The Client

Its too long to post, you can check it at https://gist.github.com/1653062

You can run the client like “ant trafficevent -Dtrpurl=http://localhost:8280 -Devent=traffic.is.crazy”

The Gadget
https://gist.github.com/1653079.js?file=TrfficEventGadget.xml
In Action

 

A simple tool for all sorts of diagrams

Recently I had to draw some solutions architecture diagrams, and searched some good tools for diagramming. I have used Visio, long time back, nice tool, but I wanted to stick to Ubuntu and didn’t like switching back and forth. I tried Dia and Umbrello but they couldn’t really content me.

What I really digged in a nice architecture diagram is mainly its simplicity (Simple way the complex scenarios are drawn), fresh, elegant and rich look, as for a diagramming tool, it has to be simple (don’t have to be an artist) and flexible (should be able to draw new shapes if needed etc)

Sometime back I have used “Pencil” to draw some wire frames for a web app I was creating, I really liked the tool, and the final look and feel of the diagram it created. Non of the advance diagramming tools generated such a rich look and feel. So I thought of creating few custom stencils to graduate Pencil from a wire-framing tool to a full fledged multipurpose diagramming tool.

I created Three stencils to draw most of the enterprise architecture diagrams, following diagram is a sample solutions architecture diagrams I created using Pencil, and the custom stencils I created.

The stencils I have created are,

So if you are interested go ahead download the stencils, and install them in “Pencil” and if you still haven’t tried “Pencil”, I highly recommend it.