Tag: Shindig

WSO2 Gadget Server 1.3.0 is out with a bunch of awaited features

This is a short post aiming to notify the new features of WSO2 Gadget Server 1.3.0 which was released recently. The product is popular among the community as a gadget rendering platform, which provides a presentation layer for heterogeneous enterprise services based on Google Gadgets Specification and Apache Shindig. As an enterprise presentation product, the Gadget server is now fully fledged with number of awaited features such as,

And some of the important features of WSO2 Gadget Server are,

Try out The Gadget Server 1.3.0, and provide your feedback to make it better and brighter. You can provide feedback, report bugs and join in with architectural discussions at any of WSO2 public lists and also you can have a better understanding via going through many articles at WSO2 Oxygen tank.

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WSO2 Gadget Server 1.1.0, What to expect

WSO2 Carbon 3.0.0 – code name “Iridium” is just about to release in few more days. as of WSO2’s release strategy, all the products will graduate with their next version on top of carbon based platform. As for the newly released Gadget Server it would be version 1.1.0

Features were frozen for version 1.1.0 and that was in the end of February as I recall. We (the GS team) managed to squeeze in few new very important features to this release.

  • Upgraded shindig to the latest version

This was a bummer, since WSO2 Carbon platform is running on OSGi, if you had to use a non native OSGi project (i.e. Shindig) you will have to create an OSGi aware carbon orbit bundle and make use of it at run time. This was done some time back where shindig was on r734876 revision. In-order to leverage new functionalities such as OAuth, Pub-Sub etc. and to patch the bug fixes we thought of updating the shindig carbon orbit bundle. So now shindig is on r910768 and is quite up to date.

  • i18n internationalization support for gadgets

i18n is not a big deal for Google gadgets since the gadget API itself supports it, What we had to do is enable i18n support in shindig. (Which was already implemented by the shindig community)

  • Inter Gadget communication

Inter gadget communication, seemed to be the hot topic in our forums and webinars, all most in all tech talks we did about the Gadget Server, some person in the audience raised the question about gadget-to-gadget communication. Our answer was “it can be done at shindig level, and we are yet to support it”. So without a long await, with GS v1.1.0 we enabled this feature. The architecture is quite fascinating where there will be zero backend calls and all the communication is done simply on the front-end. Basically each publisher will have a publishing channel and the subscribers can subscribe to this channel. After that its simple pub-sub.

  • The portal will completely run on HTTP transport

This was a limitation we had in our fist release. The portal was running only on HTTPS, and the reason behind was that all WSO2 products are running on secure transport and the Gadget Server is also a combination of some specific components which ran on the same platform. For this release we went the extra mile and enabled HTTP for the portal. So once you go to the login page it will switch to the secure transport (HTTPS) and after successful login you will redirect back to the HTTP non-secure mode. (Of cause you can disable HTTP any time and run the portal purely on HTTPS, it all depends on the requirement.)

One disappointment I have is that we couldn’t integrate OAuth on time. even though it is supported at shindig level we have to do a considerable amount of work from the Gadget Server side to fully support it, hence it is postponed to our next release. You can try the sample OAuth GData Gadget, simply adding it by the URL, and that will work like a charm. (nothing useful but just to let you know that we are only few steps behind on it)

Okey so enough sneak peak 😉 download the Gadget Server pre-beta, play with it, and help us to improve (even in the last minute) by reporting any issues.

Cheers !!

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.

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.