WSO2, which turned 5 last August , released last month, Carbon Studio, a comprehensive development environment for its middleware platform. The tool simplifies the development, test and deployment of services, mediation flows and google gadgets. WSO2 is producing its entire middleware platform as 100% open source under Apache license. Last year WSO2's platform underwent a major refactoring taking advantage of OSGi, and last August, the company shipped Stratos, a Cloud-based instantiation of the middleware platform.
Carbon Applications (CApps) consist of any combination of web services, mashups, data services, ESB configs, business processes, rules etc. Complete CApps can be deployed as a single Carbon Archives (.car) onto WSO2 Carbon-based servers or onto a WSO2 Stratos-based cloud. A Carbon Archives contains CApp's artifacts (.war, .aar...):
Other than deployable itself, a C-App artifact has a name, a version, some set of dependencies and a server role
The ESB editor supports creating or editing entire or individual synapse configurations. From a UI perspective, the editor supports the development of HTML/JSP based UIs which can be deployed on any of the Carbon Server or Google Gadgets which need to be deployed on the Gadget Server. Carbon Studio supports also the management of the Carbon Servers Registry. A registry contains collections, resources hosted on the server and their metadata. Carbon Studio also contains a data service editor, and integrate Eclipse BPEL editor and OpenSocial development tools. This Webinar, presented by Saminda Wijeratne and Chathuri Wimalasena, provides an introduction to Carbon Studio.
InfoQ spoke briefly with Paul Fremantle, CTO of WSO2, on the current state of Composite Service-based Applications.
InfoQ: I seems that the industry is finally catching up on many of the concepts that were developed nearly a decade ago around SOA and Composite applications. Tens of thousands of services are now available, and every day new applications are consuming them. What is the main reason behind this success?
Paul: There are two major reasons for this success. First, I think that we are finally getting interop via SOAP, XML, JSON and REST. Second, it has become easier to develop Composite Applications with tools, libraries, servers and clouds.
InfoQ: How do you see Identity Management, and standards such as OAuth, playing in modern composite applications?
Paul: The old way of doing composite apps assumed either no identity or fixed identities. The ability to do end-to-end authentication and authorization is key to doing real distributed, multi-org composite apps.
InfoQ: Are we just scratching the surface today with mashups and data services or do you see already the next wave of services which could be more process and event driven?
Paul: I think there are move waves, but I think, for instance, it needs to be easier to build processes: BPEL/BPMN are great for business analysts, but we need better approaches for developers.
Composite Applications are becoming the de facto programming model in the industry both in IT and consumer oriented applications. Are the technologies, tools and platform good enough? Is there more progress needed? What's your take on it?