New Open Source WSO2 Mashup Server Combines Best of Web 2.0 and SOA to Enable the Social Enterprise
Monday 28 January 2008WSO2 Mashup Server and Mooshup.com Mashup Service Let Mashups Scale from Individuals to Enterprise Teams to Internet Communities
Colombo, Sri Lanka and Mountain View, CA – January 28, 2008 – WSO2, the open source SOA company, announced today the launch of the WSO2 Mashup Server 1.0. The open source Mashup Server for the first time combines the simplicity and richness of mashups with the reusability, security, reliability and governance required for a service-oriented architecture (SOA). In doing so, it allows enterprises to empower their Web developers, business analysts, and other power users to develop valuable situational applications. These mashups can be published, shared, rated, tagged, commented upon, and searched to maximize their value to the enterprise.
In conjunction with the release of the Mashup Server, WSO2 also is launching the beta of Mooshup.com, a hosted online version of the Mashup Server. Mooshup.com provides an open community site for developing, running, and sharing mashups. Mashups can be easily downloaded to or uploaded from any WSO2 Mashup Server.
WSO2 Redefines the Mashup Server
The WSO2 Mashup Server provides a unique and powerful platform for consuming information in a variety of forms including Web services, HTML, and feeds, processing and aggregating that information, and publishing the result as a new Web service. Each new service comes with rich metadata to simplify its consumption by other mashups and other Web service clients, and with artifacts that simplify the construction of user interfaces in browsers, rich applications, and other environments.
By supporting the separation of content and presentation through XML and Web services, the Mashup Server enables recursively mashing up services (a mashup service can be consumed by another mashup), and broadens the user interface palette beyond HTML to RSS and Atom feeds, email, instant messaging, and more.
Services can be accessed using the common request-response pattern, or the service can be programmed to run over long periods of time. For example, a mashup initiating instant messaging alerts can warn transport companies about possible delays any time there is fresh snow or rally a company ski club to enjoy some fresh powder.
The WSO2 Mashup Server employs JavaScript to define mashups, leveraging the flexibility and popularity of this dynamic language and its broad base of skilled developers. Mashups can be authored directly within the administrative UI, with a simple text editor, or with any popular IDE, eliminating lock-in to a single IDE.
The WSO2 Mashup Server promotes visibility and improves the governance and long-term utility of mashups within an enterprise by providing a Web 2.0-style administration site that lets users discover, try, rate, comment on, and tag mashups, as well as share their own mashups.
As the first open source Mashup Server, WSO2’s solution reduces the financial barriers to implementing Web service mashups across the enterprise, simultaneously engaging the creativity of individual developers.
"“Mashups, as situational applications, are empowering individual data owners to quickly and easily expose services that enhance productivity,” said Sanjiva Weerawarana,CEO of WSO2. “With the WSO2 Mashup Server, mashups are being transformed from transient oddities into reliable, trusted services that can be shared across the enterprise or even Internet-scale communities. In the process, enterprise IT transforms gracefully from a top-down operation to a bottom-up initiative driven by the people who understand their business needs best.”
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WSO2 Mashup Server Features
The WSO2 Mashup Server is built on the WSO2 Web Services Application Server, based on Apache/Axis2, and WSO2’s built-in registry. These products bring enterprise security, reliability and governance to mashups used in business. As with other WSO2 open source products, the WSO2 Mashup Server is released under the Apache License 2.0. Other key features include:
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XML Web service-centric model that supports separation of content and presentation. Web services mashups are authored in JavaScript with E4X (Ecmascript for XML) extensions.
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Simple and familiar deployment model: ability to author and deploy mashups using notepad and a Mashup Server virtual directory.
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Auto-generation of Web service and UI artifacts, such as WSDL, REST URLs, JavaScript stubs.
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Ability to compose data from various sources: Web services, RSS, HTML scraping, and files, among others.
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Try-It feature to help developers invoke and debug mashups or start developing their own rich HTML clients.
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Web 2.0-style console, powered by the WSO2 Registry, which natively supports different users, and allows tags, comments, and ratings and a powerful search capability.
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Migration of mashups, from personal hosting to enterprise or Internet hosting.
""There's a simplification, or at least refinement, of SOA ideas and technologies going on at the moment. While the SOA world has the complete and solid solution nailed, people like WSO2 are showing that there's room to further iterate the developer-level idea of what an SOA is,” said Michael Coté a software industry analyst with RedMonk. “The WSO2 Mashup Server is an example of this trend, for example, by using JavaScript to give a simpler interface into orchestrating complex data flows, sort of hiding the hoary part of SOA from developers without throwing the baby out with the bath-water.”
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Availability and Support
The WSO2 Mashup Server 1.0 is available for
download
today. As a fully open source solution released under the Apache License 2.0, the WSO2 Mashup Server does not carry any software licensing or subscription fees. Today also marks the beta launch of Mooshup.com, which offers free membership upon email verification. WSO2 offers a range of service and support options to support these solutions. These include consulting, custom development, and sponsorship of open source feature development; development and production support; and training. For information on service and support packages, visit
http://wso2.com
. Additionally, the WSO2 Oxygen Tank (
http://wso2.org
) is an open developer portal that provides in-depth product information, tutorials, tools, forums, wikis and more.
About WSO2
WSO2 is the open source SOA company founded by pioneers in Web services and of members of the Apache Software Foundation Web services community. The company is delivering a new, entirely open source middleware stack that is optimized for Web services and SOA. The company’s first products are the WSO2 Web services Application Server (based on Apache Axis2) and WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (based on Apache Synapse), which are built on the WSO2 Web services Framework. The company is backed by Intel Capital and maintains operations in the United States, United Kingdom and Sri Lanka.