WSO2 - 2009

Paul has blogged about WSO2 achievements in 2009.

It has been a simply phenomenal year and I want to thank all the WSO2 team who have made it happen. The efforts have been outstanding and if anything there was more professionalism and even smoother operations this year. We are truly moving from startup to mature company. Above all the team displayed "Grace Under Pressure" - which is how Ernest Hemingway described having "guts".

I could not agree more - we are evolving into a mature company. And I think one of our key strengths is our ability to evolve as a team, in conquering "enterprise challenges".

My 2009

It was a fabulous year for me personally.

I set couple of goals for the year, and I did achieve all of those. I might admit, the first time that I manage to do that.

One of the secrets of success was, I kept my goals simple. Just couple of them.

The other was that, I kept focus, and took corrective steps to fix and get them back on course, when those deviated.

Also, success of 2009, was based on hard work done in previous years. So it is kind of a long journey to get here.

Apart from achieving the year's goals (which are personal, hence, I will not note them down here), there also happen to be some notable happenings in life.

Firt of all, the work - life balance. Specially being able to devote some time for the elder son. There were many days where 14-18 hour work day was regular, even towards the end of the year, still I was able to have some time to share a moment with the kid.

I also got to this habit of not going online on weekends. I would check email on Saturday morning and hardly use the internet modem till Monday morning. I would use the laptop, to write, to read, but would rather not go online, where I would get glued to a mail thread on something. This helped a great deal to devote some time to other matters in life, other than work.

I also learned the importance of co-location when it comes to work. Though I thought that I could do most of my work from home being online, it proved to me that I had to be in the office, to talk to people, face to face. So I got to admit that, the mid of the year was slow, as I was mostly working from home. But in order to get back to the same level of productivity, I used to drive back to office every day, even after noon, chase that boosted productivity as well as effectiveness a great deal.

I wrote a second book this year. I am yet to blog about it.

I read a lot this year. The most inspiring being a book on the myths of innovation. I also read a book on how to think better. Though I read many other things, these two are the most note worthy.

Towards the mid of this year, I realized that, the next year, I will celebrate 10 years in industry. And the fact that I am getting old.

And as always, I enjoyed work, specially the fact that I got involved with the BAM product at the grass root level, in addition to being part of many other things that was going on in engineering. I thought getting involved with some client issues as well as the cloud computing effort was fun as well as educating.

I do not just "hope" that 2010 would be a better year, as I "know" 2010 will be one of the best in my life, given that I have set the stage for that in 2009.

Last Hours of a Historic Year - 2009

It simply is a historic year - 2009.

For Sri Lanka, there has not been a better year. It is the year that we got over the civil war. I would not call it a win, as there are no winners in a war, in any war, given the costs. However, the war is no more. Which is a great achievement for all Sri Lankans. No matter who claims the ownership of the end of the war, if one looks at the ground reality, it is not one individual, rather the people in this country, who ended it for future generations.

It was fought for thirty years. People were fed up with it. The terror leader was growing older. And the generations who suffered from the war, from childhood, became young and strong. They fought with their blood for those whom were slaughtered by the terrorists. They had enough in their guts to fight through the drought, rain, flood and through fierce resistance, for they fought to bring justice to those who fell, their won fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters.

Needless to say that this war was started by few idiots, with very shallow political agendas. Though it is over now, I do not see any steps, whatsoever, taken to prevent such a catastrophe in the future. We remain wide open to be exploited and be fooled into such situations. And I see no politician taking this seriously, to fix the situation. However, it is time that we Sri Lankans can learn a lesson here. If we could get over such a cruel war, we can also defeat the root causes that keep us a poor country. No matter what, politicos and the government that are composed of those politicos are doing, the people can drive this country towards prosperity.

The war is over now. It is not time to argue who won it, how, and for what reasons. We are wasting valuable time on those. It is time to question, what next, where to, and how... and lets not wait for the government to take initiative, let the people begin...

Space Backyard

This is how your backyard will look from your house in space.

My Christmas

This Christmas was significant to me for few reasons.

First of all, it was my elder son's first meaningful Christmas. Meaning that now, three years, he understands lot around him. So I wanted to make his Christmas a memorable one. I got him engaged with the Christmas tree, decorated it with stars that he himself painted, and he took lot of pride in that. Now he calls the tree, "My Christmas Tree".

Second, after about two years, I got offline for the longest. I was offline for three days on the trot. I cannot believe it myself :)

Third, I went to a church after a long time. Not often that happens. More than not having time, it is that I do not feel right in my mind to go to a church. I do not like to listen to these stories that these priests tell. But I wanted to take my kid, so I did. I do not want him to inherit my beliefs the way I have it. Rather he need to learn on his own, and I thought of just facilitating that.

Recently, there was an outbreak of violence between Buddhists and Catholics in the village that I live in. There is this new church built and the Buddhists dislike that because they think that it is too close to the two temples in the village. Now I do not care if the Church is built or not, since there are plenty around. But the funny thing was that, there was this "drinking party" in a near by house to my house, and the house owners as well as the participants were Buddhists, celebrating Christmas. A few days back they were trying to kill the Catholic priest, and now they are enjoying Christmas. I could not sleep last night as these guys were singing next door, drunk, after midnight. I was questioning, if I or should they be celebrating. After all, Christmas is meant for everyone, so no hard feelings for no sleep last night ;)

Climax of Evolution

Linux - Windows - Mac

Podcast: WSO2 Business Activity Monitor

Both business as well as IT domain experts want right information at the right time and in the right place to monitor and understand business activities to make more informed and better decisions and hence the need to analyze historical and current data and situations. In this podcast, Samisa Abeysinghe, WSO2 Director of Engineering answers some key questions on how WSO2 Business Activity Monitor (BAM) fits into this space serving the needs of both business and IT domain experts to monitor and understand business activities within an SOA deployment.

Website Navigations

The navigation might be the single most important aspect of a web design’s usability. Without a navigation, you would be stuck on the home page for a very long time. I believe a navigation or menu must be easy to use, but this doesn’t mean it has to be boring. In fact, it helps to add a little flair to your navigation. It entices visitors to click and hang around your site a little longer. Here are thirty examples of beautifully designed web design navigation for your inspiration.

There - Here - n - There -- Everywhere

Look carefully. Not sure how they do that, but it is something to think about.

English WordClock

English passed the 1,000,000 threshold on June 10, 2009 at 10:22 am GMT

English gains a new word every 98 minutes (or about 14.7 new words a day)

Source : http://www.languagemonitor.com/

Word of the Year 2009: Twitter

Global Language Monitor, which studies the use of words and phrases, announced that "twitter" is the top word of 2009 based on its tracking of words and phrases used in the media and online.

The complete SOA platform

Today, enterprises expectations expand well beyond service hosting, ESB and service governance, when it comes to enterprise applications. The need for monitoring, the need for analyzing and the need for orchestrating and fine tuning business processes has become real to realize the agile enterprise.

However, it is a matter of fact, that, supporting all these needs require a comprehensive set of tools.

More than four years ago, WSO2 began the journey to build this comprehensive SOA stack with support for connectivity services using Apache Axis2 as the base, and came up with WSO2 WSAS. Then began the effort on WSO2 ESB, using Apache Synapse as the basis. Data services support was also implemented, with an innovative approach to allow DBAs to stick with SQL and yet leverage the power of Apache Axis2 based web services capabilities.

Once we had the connectivity services, data service and ESB working to a decent level, WSO2 started working on making SOA governance a reality. We built a registry and also worked on identity server. And we also built a mashups server, and again, going by WSO2's revolutionary think tank to be innovative, we adopted a unique approach for service orchestration - using JavaScript.

As the SOA tooling platform evolved, WSO2's award winning CTO, Paul, sensed the need for a unified base for the platform. And the company started working on the WSO2 Carbon platform. This component oriented design, based on OSGi technology, set the stage for WSO2 to unify crosscutting concerns such as security, eventing, reporting, user interface, etc. across the SOA enabling products. It also paved the way for WSO2 to come up with new products in quick time, thanks to the ability to mix and match existing components in the component repository with new components built to meet new product needs.

With the middleware component platform in place, WSO2 started building tools to realize business process, presentation and business monitoring needs of the enterprises. Business process server was built to leverage the power of BPEL, using Apache ODE, to enable users to manage business processes.

Then came the effort to complete the last mile. We needed to support the presentation layer, as well as tools to help monitor business with KPI monitoring and BI capabilities. The gadget server was built using Apache Shinding, and as always, it was a revolutionary and innovative approach that was taken by WSO2, using sate of the art technology to build a new breed of portal server. We also built a business activity monitor, mainly using the extensibility of Apache Axis2, but also keeping it open to allow any SOA system to be monitored, using an event based model.

With today's announcements on WSO2 Gadget Server and WSO2 Business Activity Monitor, WSO2 SOA platform becomes the most comprehensive and also the most complete open source SOA platform around. And it might not be an over statement to mention that, we have left the fellow open source based competitors in he dust, by addressing the platform aspect, and not focusing on one or two requirements of the SOA platform. And WSO2 is now in a position to take over industry leaders in this space, such as IBM and Oracle. The competitive advantage of WSO2 here is that, while the SOA middleware platform is enterprise class, it is lean. Anyone can get any of the product up and running, within minutes, not days and not even hours. All products are based on the philosophy of zero code with respect to configuration. And all products being based on a unified platform, they look consistent - little learning time, and they act consistent - no surprises.

The good new is that, we have a complete platform today. The better news is that, WSO2 is not done, we just started...

What Matters Now

What matters now is a free e-book. Download here, or read more info.

I am in the process of reading this, and there are tons of inspiration in here.

Government

“When the best leader leads, the people say ‘We did it ourselves’.” – Lao Tzu

BAM and Service Monitoring

Detailed monitoring of services! Thats is one of the key features of WSO2 BAM, which is about to be announced soon.

We are using gadgets to empower users to monitor SOA deployments.

Experience business activity monitoring with open source tool, WSO2 BAM.

Images of Ceylon (Sri Lanka)

Sri Maha Bodhi

Sri Maha Bodhi, located at Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka, is the oldest, known human-planted tree. When lord Buddha became to enlightenment, he was sitting under the mother tree which was known as the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, India

Ancient Ruins

There are tons of ancient ruins around Sri Lanka. Sometimes, the technology they used, thousands of years ago, still amazes me.

See more pictures of Sri Lanka.

Or visit Sri Lanka if you want to see them for real, now that the war is over.

It is worth having a look in your lifetime.

BAM Dashboard - Visualization

This is just a glimpse of a combination of the dashboards and gadgets that you get out of WSO2 BAM visualization tools.

Paul on Portal

This is from Paul's blog on Portal

I've been testing out our new product - the WSO2 Gadget Server - which is getting very close to release. What is a Gadget Server I hear you ask? Well, its basically a portal, except that instead of writing portlets you write gadgets. In fact, its a whole new way of creating a portal server, and much better than the existing approaches.

Short-Term Memory and Web Usability

The human brain is not optimized for the abstract thinking and data memorization that websites often demand. Many usability guidelines are dictated by cognitive limitations.

Designing for Brainpower Limitations

When it comes to abstract thinking, humans have extremely limited brainpower. For example, short-term memory famously holds only about 7 chunks of information, and these fade from your brain in about 20 seconds.

It's a common misconception that limited short-term memory implies that menus should be similarly limited to 7 items. It's fine to have longer menus (if needed), because users don't have to memorize the full list of menu items. The entire idea of a menu is to rely on recognition rather than recall.

100% Business on the Cloud?

I do not think so.

There will always be those legacy apps, those good old ones as well as not that old ones, that you might not want to touch for now. Hence it is not a must to take them and push them by force to cloud.

And those parts of the enterprise app that are "sensitive", "niche" and probably the "competitive edge" would not worth the risk of letting alone in that cloudy sky.

The edge is to know what to have on the cloud and what not. It again boils down to enterprise architecture problem. This is where you need cloud tools, to bridge your internal enterprise apps with your external cloud leverage.

Edging closer to BAM release

When I looked at the dashboard this morning, it was very impressive. And we are filling in the gaps gradually. We will have the first release candidate today.

And we also have the first cut project page on OT for WSO2 Business Activity Monitor (WSO2 BAM) published today. Visit it and read it for a preview.

Monitoring your business that you run on your SOA is about to get much simpler...

Google Dictionary

Google has added one more to its tools. The latest is dictionary: http://www.google.com/dictionary

Single-atom transistor discovered

Researchers from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) have succeeded in building a working transistor, whose active region composes only of a single phosphorus atom in silicon. The results have just been published in Nano Letters.

All Men ...

I do not think this is news for women :)

Yes You Can!

Google Analytics Launches Asynchronous Tracking

A new Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking Code snippet has been announced as an alternative way to track your websites! It provides the following benefits:

• Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
• Enhanced data collection & accuracy
• Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn't fully loaded

Have a look at the new JavaScript code snippet for Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking.

Climate Change 'Fraud"

The world seems certainly divided on matters of climate change.

In a controversial talk just days before the start of a climate summit attended by world leaders in Copenhagen, Prof Plimer said Governments were treating the public like “fools” and using climate change to increase taxes.

So governments are trying to make some money.

He said carbon dioxide has had no impact on temperature and that recent warming was part of the natural cycle of climate stretching over billions of years.

And the world is really warming up

He suggested many scientists had a vested interest in promoting climate change because it helped secure more funding for research. He said: “The climate comrades are trying to keep the gravy train going. Governments are also keen on putting their hands as deep as possible into our pockets.

And some scientists are also trying to make some money.

Read More!

I cannot blog about BAM product any more!!!

It is getting hard.

So hard that I cannot blog about it any more.

It is becoming hard to explain it with words, or take screen shots of it, to provide a picture.

Yes, it has become so dynamic, that you need some screen cast or something to explain it. Let me see if I can do some videos and post!

ClimateGate - The Biggest Scandle in Science?

It might be the case that global warming is a big bad fabricated lie.

"Britain’s Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia, suffered a data breach in recent days when a hacker apparently broke into their system and made away with thousands of emails and documents. The stolen data was then posted to a Russian server and has quickly made the rounds among climate skeptics. The documents within the archive, if proven to be authentic, would at best be embarrassing for many prominent climate researchers and at worst, damning."

The hacked file is online and you can find more info from this article. Specially look at the extracts from the emails, well, I am not sure if they are authentic, but if they are...

From Phil Jones (modification of data to hide unwanted results):

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

What is Governance as a Service

WSO2 Governance as a Service will provide a WSO2 Governance Registry hosted instance on the web following the SaaS principle. You can use this online without having to download, install, configure and deploy the WSO2 Governance Registry package.

This multi-tenant, hosted version is completely self-serviced with each tenant or domain having its own theme, own logo and of course own users. While it can be managed by its own user community, tenants optionally can publish some data publicly, for example business-to-business service entries.

To learn more, read the FAQ on Governance as a Service.

Light Painting

See more

C++ Web Services Case Study

WSO2 Web Services Framework for C++ is a complete Web services stack. It has the support for basic Web services standards, handles binary attachments and also has the widest coverage of WS* standards including WS-Addressing, WS-Security, WS-Security Policy, WS-Secure Conversation, and WS-Reliable Messaging. The WSO2 Web Services Framework for C++ provides a comprehensive service and client APIs for the C++ developer. WSO2 Web Services Framework for C++ comes with built-in code generation tool to support rapid development of services and clients.

WSO2 Web Services Framework for C++ can be used to wrap existing applications and expose them as a Web service as well as to enable new applications developed in C/C++ to talk to other heterogeneous systems.

This article, explores the usage of WSO2 Web Services Framework for C++ in converting a software system in a retail store to a loosely coupled Web services based system integrating it with it's other stores providing value to the retail store chain.