Category: PaaS

[white paper review] WSO2 Platform Offerings for Developers

WSO2 recently published a new white paper on what WSO2 platform can offer for developers. The paper talks about all the elements of WSO2 middleware platform and how it can aid a developer to build & govern enterprise applications.

The paper discusses about REST and SOAP service development with technologies like JAX-RS/WS and also using more of modern ways like jaggeryjs. The author have illustrated the plusses of each paradigm, when to use it and how to use it. The paper discusses how to write such services with support of WSO2 developer tooling, deploy them into WSO2 middleware and also manage them using WSO2 governance toolset.

The paper takes a deep dive into technologies like Apache CXF use and JEE support within WSO2 platform and how to use these frameworks to develop applications.

The paper also talks about API management which is a hot topic at present and how WSO2 API management solution can easily expose fully managed APIs for already created services.

There is a section on modern visualization composition in the paper where it discusses creating dashboards, micro-sites and simple html pages for the purpose of information visualization and management. This is with the use of WSO2 User Engagement Center

Use of cloud APIs via WSO2 integration platform (WSO2 ESB Cloud connectors) is highlighted in the paper giving the developers an insight on how to connect their applications to external APIs.

The paper also talks about using the AppFactory; WSO2’s newest tool for application development, management, governance, team management.

Do checkout the white paper as it gives an end-to-end idea about application development lifecycle with WSO2 platform

Gadgets On the Cloud

There is no doubt that JavaScript/XML gadgets make a great presentation layer over the web with increasing amount of data floating around. The ability of which these gadgets can be embedded in any place over the web, provides a great flexibility, and a wider reach. Google does this quite nicely with their iGoogle gadgets, enabling the gadgets to be embedded in almost any web page. The success of this great idea, would be only logical if all the data, services and mashups are also available over the web with open access or maybe authenticated access. This is where a cloud story fits-in, and this the very reason why Google can do it quite easily.

However, what if you want to do everything from the scratch and also provide a great presentation layer for the users. For an instance, lets say you have a lot of financial data within your enterprise, and you need to provide some of these to your customers, to general public and some for your employees. To do this, you will have to create appropriate data services, maybe mediate or transform some data, integrate with some legacy data sources, create some business work flows, mashup them with some 3rd party services like Google finance or charts and finally expose the end results to the targeted user group. This is where WSO2 Stratos PaaS comes for your rescue 🙂

If your requirements are such, you will need a strong middle-ware platform to full fill all the above tasks, and if its all on the cloud, you will not have to worry about anything other than writing your business logic. Once the business logic is correctly compiled, you can Mashup some of your data with external service APIs, and then write the presentation logic purely on javascript and xml as XML Gadgets and expose them to the users you need. Once the gadgets are published on WSO2 Cloud Gadget Server its just a matter of linking them up in any web page you want over the web.

https://gadget.cloud.wso2.com/ifr?container=default&mid=3&nocache=1&country=US&lang=en&view=default&parent=https%3A%2F%2Fgadget.cloud.wso2.com%2F&debug=1&up_=undefined&st=john.doe%3Ajohn.doe%3A10717%3Ashindig%3Ahttp%253A//gadget.cloud.wso2.com%253A80/registry/resource/_system/config/repository/gadget-server/gadgets/ngeo_vid.xml%3A0%3Adefault&url=http%3A%2F%2Fgadget.cloud.wso2.com%3A80%2Fregistry%2Fresource%2F_system%2Fconfig%2Frepository%2Fgadget-server%2Fgadgets%2Fngeo_vid.xml#rpctoken=1304649864https://gadget.cloud.wso2.com/ifr?container=default&mid=0&nocache=1&country=US&lang=en&view=default&parent=https%3A%2F%2Fgadget.cloud.wso2.com%2F&debug=1&up_=undefined&st=john.doe%3Ajohn.doe%3A10197%3Ashindig%3Ahttp%253A//gadget.cloud.wso2.com%253A80/registry/resource/_system/config/repository/gadget-server/gadgets/soa.xml%3A0%3Adefault&url=http%3A%2F%2Fgadget.cloud.wso2.com%3A80%2Fregistry%2Fresource%2F_system%2Fconfig%2Frepository%2Fgadget-server%2Fgadgets%2Fsoa.xml#rpctoken=1304649864

The above two gadgets are taken from WSO2 Cloud Gadget Server and have linked in to this blog, to convince about the great flexibility and reach it can add-up. You do not need to use the Cloud Gadget Portal as the only place for your data to be presented (Of cause if you are not using other gadget server specific privileges such as inter-gadget communication etc). You can simply use the Gadget Server as your own gadget repository, and encourage users to discover the gadgets and embed them into their own web pages over the web.

To sum up the story I would say, try-out Stratos, try out the available services and you will definitely find out more use cases, and creative ways to use the platform and leverage the advantages of the cloud

WSO2 Stratos – A true cloud story

Stratos Services

Yesterday (1st of June), A little over a 12 developer team at WSO2, took a great middle-ware platform in to the cloud. It’s not just putting all our server products on an EC2 instance, but embedding all cloud-native features into them. The PaaS (Platform as a Service) is named as WSO2 Stratos, which is based on award winning WSO2 Carbon middle-ware platform. As the Alpha-1 release, Stratos offers number of WSO2 products integrated, namely Governance Registry (GREG), Identity Server (IS), Business Activity Monitor (BAM), Mashup Server (MS) and WSO2 Gadget Server (GS).

Stratos is also offered as a downloadable version for the private cloud within your enterprise. If you are quite serious about using SOA for your enterprise and do not need to worry about deployment, scalability and server maintenance, Stratos would be the ideal solution for you.