Web Services – @nuwanbando

[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

{jaggery.js}

Is something I’ve been working on at wso2 for sometime, if you are following me I have tweeted the updates, releases etc. Jaggery went live with its fifth milestone, few weeks ago at jaggeryjs.org, its still young and has alot to improve.

Explaining a little bit about jaggery; Its NOT an alternative to node, its simply a toolkit to easily compose webapps and apis. Its a completely javascript way of writing all parts of the web application, and communicate throughout in json. Jaggery has out of the box features to create RESTfull applications, and its one of it’s value propositions. Jaggery can be easily extended via modules which can be written in javascript or java for that matter.

A very simple page that prints out some request properties in jaggery looks like,

<html>
   <body>
      <p>
      <%
          print("Method : " + request.getMethod() + "<br/>");
          print("Protocol : " + request.getProtocol() + "<br/>");
          print("User-Agent : " + request.getHeader("User-Agent"));
      %>
      </p>
   </body>
</html>

Jaggery docs site also provide a tool for you to try out some code and play around. So you can simply copy the above code and paste in jaggery try-it

I recently did a webinar on jaggery that explains the simple case, over looking its API and samples. Below is the recording hope it’ll help.

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

“Jaggery” – A web{app/service} completely in Javascript

At WSO2 we are busy with something new for the new year 🙂 and we have just pushed the milestone-1 of it, not so complete but you can sure taste it. Everybody knows that WSO2 is big on Web Services, but over the years we have seen that the barrier between Web Services and Web Applications hasn’t been lowered. “Jaggery” is an effort to diminish this barrier and to merge the development process of services and applications.

By definition it is a framework to write webapps and HTTP-focused web services in pure Javascript for all aspects of the application: front-end, communication, Server-side logic and persistence, and yes as I mentioned one of the intents of the framework is to reduce the gap between writing web apps and web services.

In general web engineers are fond of javascript (and JSON of cause), so why not write the server piece, persistence logic and the communication in-between also in JS itself ?

“Jaggery” helps you to do just that! Right now, the Javascript you compose will be fetched by Rhino engine and execute at the server, At Milestone-1 we have pushed features such as,

Compose server side web pages (HTML templates) : Server logic written in javascript (.JSSP)
Compose server side scripts purely in javascript (.JSS)
Includes support for,

HTTP request/response and session
JSON send/receive
Server side XMLHttpRequest
Web Service invocation
File I/O
Email
Atom
Read/write feed
Relational database
WSO2 Registry/Repository
Open Social gadgets

A hello world server-side script looks as follows,
https://gist.github.com/1506790.js?file=HelloWorld.jss

and a HTML mixed, server page looks like,
https://gist.github.com/1514681.js?file=gistfile1.txt

For more information and samples you can visit Jaggery M1 Homepage, and stay tuned for more updates soon 🙂

Meet me at WSO2Con 2011

WSO2Con 2011 is a technical and IT-Biz conference organized by WSO2 inc, and 2011 is its second consecutive time. Last year the conference concluded grandly and it discussed many technical topics such as enterprise computing, cloud, web services security, enterprise data etc. It concluded with a great panel discussion on the topic “A Walk Down Memory Lane: XML, Web Services & SOA from 1990 to 2010” and the panelists were some of the renowned personalities in XML Web services space.

So the conference is back this year, and it will be on September 12th to 16th at Waters Edge Colombo, There will be two tutorial sessions (12th and 16th) and the conference will span for three days (13th, 14th and 15th). The agenda was recently announced officially, and it surely looks interesting. I guess if you are into Distributed Computing, SOA and Cloud this would be the right place to and the event to be apart of.

Also am quite proud to blog about that I will also be one of the speakers in the 2011 conference, The topic I submitted was “User interfaces in distributed environments” and later I altered it to “Users: The SOA Last Mile” to make it broader.

Main reason for this topic is that I have done some resent work close to the Users of information systems and about delivering information to users effectively and efficiently, I believe I can talk about it, and maybe give some insight about How important the “Last Mile” is. Anyhow I don’t wona write about What I will be talking, coz mainly its still a blank paper for me too 😀

So yeah what I wanted to say is that WSO2Con will be happening on September in Colombo, and I have no doubt that it will be one great tech Conf with a great set of talks and workshops, so hope to see you there soon !!!