What is WSO2 Stratos?

WSO2 Stratos is a complete SOA and developer platform offered as a self-service, multi-tenant, elastic runtime for private and public cloud infrastructures. Basically it’s the one and only open source cloud-native middleware out there in the market.

Stratos is WSO2‘s complete SOA platform(WSO2 Carbon) improved to, run as a service on the Web, deploy on your internal private cloud infrastructure based on Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Eucalyptus and (coming soon) vmWare vSphere. It is a complete Platform-as-a-Service for private and public clouds.

What does Stratos gives you?

It gives you an Application Server, Registry, Identity Server, Portal, ESB, Business Activity Monitor and Mashup Server as-a-Service, on top of Infrastrcture-as-a-Service(Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus, vmWare vSphere, Saavis and Joyent play). And these services are completely self-service, elasticly scalable, and granularly metered and monitored.

In near future WSO2 Business Process Server and other middleware applications will also be available in WSO2 Stratos.

Why WSO2 Stratos is special?

• Stratos is Cloud Native. In practice, this means that when you log into Stratos (go on try it now) you can instantly provision your own domain, together with a set of Stratos services.
  • Elasticity: Stratos manages your underlying cloud infrastructure to seamlessly handle the scalability demands of your application.
  • Multi-tenancy: Departments, developer groups, or projects run fully independently, but share the same middleware platform for maximum resource utilization.
  • Billing and Metering: Each tenant can meter their actual resource use for internal billing purposes.
  • Self Provisioning: Authorized users can provision new tenants from a web portal in moments.
  • Dynamic Discovery: Linking up services that reside in a dynamic and elastic environment can be tricky – but Stratos simplifies and automates this process with standards-based service discovery and automatic configuration capabilities.
  • Incremental Testing: Cloud fundamentally changes the way you test and deploy applications, but doesn’t reduce your quality requirements! Stratos allows you to deploy service versions side by side and carefully dial up the traffic sent to each version.
• Stratos is a PaaS, which you can use in the public web, on a virtual private cloud, or on you own hardware
• Most currently available PaaS are there to build web applications. But WSO2 offers a complete enterprise architecture – governance, business processes, integration, portal, identity and mashups.
• Common Enterprise Programming Model (not just Java, WebApp, JAX-WS, but also BPEL, XSLT, XPath, Google Gadgets, WSDL, etc)
• No vendor lock-in

• • No code lock-in: we use standards-based coding (WAR, JAX-WS, POJO) and Stratos is 100% Apache License Open Source.
  • No model lock-in: we use standards-based services:
    • Identity is based on OpenID, OAuth, XACML, WS-Trust
    • Registry is based on AtomPub and REST
    • Business Process is based on BPEL, etc
  • No hosting lock-in: you can take you apps and data from our public PaaS and re-deploy internally or on your own virtual private cloud anytime you like.

How to get started with WSO2 Stratos?

You have two options to feel the excitement of cloud-native enterprise middleware solution.

Go directly to hosted WSO2 Stratos

Download WSO2 Stratos

Related resources

• WSO2 Stratos
• Cloud Native
• Platform-as-a-Service freedom or lock-in
• WSO2 tailors open-source middleware platform for cloud-based applications, deployment models
• WSO2 debuts cloud platform for apps
• Gadgets on the cloud

Support for large XML outputsData Services are Web Services that encapsulate operations on key data entities of relevance to the enterprise, thus making data integration easy for business processes, mashups, gadgets, BI application and any service in general. According to David Linthicum

Most in the SOA community understand that data services provide controlled interfaces to underlying data, but typically don’t understand the strategic value of data services to the SOA.

He emphasized the fact that those who focus on the notion of a service as delivering functional behavior, neglect the need to manage the underlying data. He tells that

In many cases, data quality and consistency issues quickly arise, and the agility that SOA should provide is limited by the need to alter services directly after the underlying data has changed.

David argues that data services created and leveraged correctly within the context of a SOA, should provide a wide variety of features including data quality assurance, data governance, and, most importantly, the ability to support data abstractions.

Even though there are lot of benefits(David’s opinion is further elaborated by Ash Parikh), getting data service right is not an easy task. You need to consider about the design, implementation, technologies and tools you are going to use for this. You can find several guide lines and best practices in designing and implementing data services from articles “Introduction to Data Services“, “Incorporating Enterprise Data into SOA” and “How To Get Started with Data-Orientation – What Architects Told Me…“.

Even you get the concepts and your designs correct, you must find a tool which allows you to incorporate you design and best practices into the implementation in flexible and easy manner. There are so many tools out there which provide support for developing and deploying data services written following various standards. In this post I am going to introduce you to the WSO2 Data Services Server, which is a award winning product from WSO2.

WSO2′s award winning Data Services solution WSO2 Data Services Server is a data services solution that will help you to achieve your targets in data orientation.

With the recent 2.2 release WSO2 Data Services Server provides some major improvements to it’s industry leading data services solution. Following new features are included in this release.

• Support for large XML outputs – The core engine has been modified to support XML streaming. This has resulted in two notable improvements.
  • Efficient use of server memory – No matter how large the payload is, server memory does not grow propotional to it. The streaming capabilies push data to client side as and when needed
  • Improved response time
• Google Spreadsheets as a data source
• Content filtering based on user roles
• Support for named parameters
• Ability to configure schema type for output elements
• Mixing multiple data source types in nested queries
• Excel 2007 support
• Support for Oracle Ref Cursor – Oracle Ref cursor is a Data type. A variable created using this data type is usually called as a Cursor Variable. Some of the primary advantages of using a ref cursor are,
  • ability to pass resultset between sub programs (eg: functions, stored procedures)
  • dynamic queries
  • efficient memory utilization

For more tutorials on WSO2 Data Services Server visit wso2.org.

WSO2 Business Process Server team released the latest version(1.1.0) of WSO2 BPS yesterday 19th November 2009.  As the successor of WSO2 BPS 1.0.1, WSO2 BPS 1.1.0 comes with handful of new features which will make process developer’s life easier.

WSO2 BPS 1.1.0 uses revision of Apache ODE trunk which is going to be the future of Apache ODE BPEL engine as it BPEL engine. In addition to that there are several bug fixes to the Apache ODE like fixing E4X extension support when using OpenJPA data access objects. WSO2 BPS 1.1.0 comes with a completely new integration layer for Apache ODE which integrated ODE with WSO2 Carbon platform. Now the previously unsecured BPEL management API is completely secured based on WSO2 Carbon authentication mechanism and new version has a completely re-written Web service API for managing your BPEL engine. There are some improvements to be done on the management API and those will be available with the upcoming releases.

By leveraging the extension mechanism of new ODE engine, now you can extend WSO2 BPS’s BPEL language by introducing your own extension to BPEL language and deploying them on WSO2 BPS.

This version of WSO2 BPS has the provisioning support based in Equinox P2; now users can extend the BPS by installing features available in WSO2 Carbon P2 repositories. For example by installing mediation feature, you’ll be able to do service mediation using WSO2 BPS.

Here is the list of new features available in WSO2 BPS 1.1.0

• Apache ODE trunk’s revision is used as the BPEL Engine
• New WSO2 Carbon integration layer for Apache ODE
• BPEL Process Versioning Support
• Support for invoking secured(Using WS-Security) partner services.
• Experimental clustering support
• Invoke activity recovery support through management console
• E4X based data manipulation support for BPEL assignments
• BPEL Extension support for extending WS-BPEL language
• Equinox P2 based provisioning support –  extend your BPS instance by installing new P2 features [5].

You can download this release at http://wso2.org/downloads/bps.