WSO2 Carbon feature packs coming soon

As I’ve already mentioned in my previous posts, WSO2 Carbon platform is completely developed on OSGi framework. This makes Carbon a highly dynamic, flexible and easy to use platform for all WSO2 products. As a result of this, any product which runs on Carbon can be extended by adding more and more Carbon components. This allows you to install additional functionality to your product instance (WSAS, ESB, Registry etc..) extremely easily.

WSO2 Carbon feature packs are there to support you to customise your product instance. This can do wonders for you. Have you ever heard of combining features of two products in to one? Carbon platform allows you to do that. What you have to do is simple. Just download the feature pack and install it following the procedure given in the INSTALL.txt file. Basically you have to copy the Carbon components in the feature pack in to the $PRODUCT_HOME/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/plugins directory of your product and restart the server. You may have to do some more small configurations as well with some feature packs.

Following is a list of some feature packs which will be coming out soon. These features are already there in releases of one or more products. Following feature packs allows you to add those features into other WSO2 products in which those are not available by default. Products in which each feature is available by default are given within brackets.

• Mediation feature pack (Default – ESB) – Allows to add service mediation functionality. Ruwan explains how to add this into WSAS in one of his posts.
• Service hosting feature pack (Default – WSAS) – Allows to add support for aar, jaxws, spring, pojo etc services.
• Bpel feature pack (Default – BPS) – Allows to add bpel support.
• Data services feature pack (Default – Data Services) – Allows to add data services support.
• Tools feature pack (Default – WSAS, Data Services) – Allows to add tools like java2wsdl, wsdl2java, try it etc..

These feature packs will be released very soon and it will allow you to create your own SOA solution with all wanted features in a single product.

Extensibility of the WSO2 Carbon platform

WSO2’s latest SOA platform which is called WSO2 Carbon, comes with a bunch of extremely attractive attributes. Among them extensibility is one of the most important factors. Carbon platform is developed on top of OSGi technology and it adds lot of cool features to Carbon. Through this, Carbon provides a flexible and extensible platform for all WSO2 products like WSO2 WSAS 3.0, WSO2 ESB 2.0, WSO2 Registry 2.0 and WSO2 BPS 1.0.

Carbon inherits the extensibiliy of OSGi. In OSGi world, everything is a bundle. In the context of Carbon, these OSGi bundles are called Carbon components. Therefore, each and every WSO2 product which runs on Carbon is a collection of Carbon components. Installing an uninstalling a Carbon component from the base platfoam is simple. So you can develop your own Carbon components and install them into a running Carbon instance (a product like WSAS) at any time.

Find more details on developing your own Carbon component and plugging it into Carbon in the article “Getting Started with WSO2 Carbon“.

How to build WSO2 WSAS 3.0 from the source distribution

WSO2 WSAS 3.0 was released last Friday. If you are interested in building WSAS from the source distribution, please follow the following procedure. First of all download the WSAS source pack from here. This source distribution contains source codes of all the projects which are used in WSAS 3.0. Note that you have to have maven2 installed in your machine before proceeding.

Already built jar files of all the projects in the source distribution except wsas are available in the WSO2 maven repository. Therefore the easiest way to build wsas from source distribution is to build only the WSAS source online. To do that, extract the source pack, open a console and moven into wso2wsas-3.0-src/wsas/java folder and use the following command.

mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true

If you are interested in doing changes in the source code and playing with it, you have to build the entire source code. Build all projects in the source pack in the following order using the above command. Make sure you move into the folder in which the root pom.xml file exists in each and every project.

1. axis2
2. rampart
3. sandesha2
4. savan
5. transports
6. throttle, caching, eventing and xkms which are in commons
7. carbon-orbit
8. carbon
9. carbon-components
10. wsas

WSO2 Carbon 1.5 released!..

After about 6 months of tireless efforts, we were able to release WSO2 Carbon 1.5 last Friday. Carbon is the brand new SOA platform for all WSO2 products from now on. It is totally designed using cool OSGi technology and provides the common functionality for all our products (utilizes Axis2, Rampart, Sandesha2 etc). Following list is the family of WSO2 products which are newly released on top of Carbon 1.5. Now those are available to be downloaded.

• WSO2 WSAS v3.0
  
• WSO2 ESB v2.0
  
• WSO2 Registry v2.0
  
• WSO2 BPS v1.0
  

For me this release was a great experience. Although I’ve been involved in previous beta and RC releases, this is the first major release in which I could make a considerable contribution. There were many responsibilities which were assigned to me during last week. Creating branches in the svn, properly versioning them, uploading the artifacts of each sub project to the WSO2 svn repository, creating source distribution, creating documents distribution and many more. Actually I was sleepless for about 2 nights. But it was a great experience and a responsibility through which I could learn the real open source release process.