WSO2Con2011: SOA Governance with WSO2 Products

Join me to learn about SOA Governance with WSO2 Products. During this 45mins session, I'm planning to cover how WSO2's revolutionary middleware and PaaS offerings address Governance requirements of modern businesses.



Abstract:

The WSO2 Governance Registry provides end-to-end governance for enterprise applications. This session will outline will introduce key concepts of governance and then dive into a deeper discussion on how IT professionals can streamline application development, testing and deployment processes, as well as manage service lifecycles and assets using WSO2 Governance Registry. Attendees also will learn about the community and social aspects of WSO2 Governance Registry as an enabler of collaboration between distributed teams, converting traditional human-centric tasks into key assets of the governance process.

Getting Started with WSO2 Governance as a Service (GaaS)

Stratos, WSO2's latest introduction, is an implementation of a complete middleware platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution on top of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), based on WSO2 Carbon. Stratos brings about all the features available on a complete WSO2 Carbon platform deployment, on a cloud infrastructure, which provides a set of multi-tenant, on-demand services that provides you with solutions to all your SOA middleware requirements, in a matter of a few clicks. Click here to start using Stratos for free, or visit, the Stratos product page to view a detailed list of services available.

This post aims at introducing you to WSO2 Governance as a Service (GaaS), which is one of the ten different services available as a part of Stratos. WSO2 Governance Registry (G-Reg), provides a single uniform facade to your SOA metadata. G-Reg allows you to store, index, catalog and build a community around your enterprise service offerings, while making use of its easy-to-use interfaces to manage dependencies, analyze impact, enforce policies, create versions, search and drive business processes. GaaS, allows you to make use the very same features on the cloud, without having worry about setting up your own G-Reg instance.

Starting to use GaaS, is as simple as creating an account for yourself on WSO2 Stratos. Getting started is as easy as following the 5 steps below.

Step 1 : Register a new domain



Step 2 : Fill in your details



After clicking on the submit button, you will see a confirmation page as seen below.



Step 3 : Confirm E-mail address

You will then receive a confirmation e-mail, with the link to your all new account on Stratos.

You now have successfully created an account which you can use to access WSO2 Governance as a Service (GaaS). Making use of GaaS is just 2 more steps.

Step 4 : Login to your Stratos account



Step 5 : Select the Stratos Governance service

This will load your own GaaS account on the cloud. The homepage will list out some useful links to help you get started.

Feel free to try out some of the interesting features of GaaS. For more information and updates, please stay in touch with the WSO2 Stratos Development team.

Why use QR Code in Blogs?

QR code, or Quick Response Code is a two dimensional bar code system invented by Denso, a Japanese Corporation, in 1994. Even though it being a very popularly used alternative to the single dimensional barcode system within Japan, its usage is limited in other parts of the world. The usefulness of a QR code is its ability to store much larger amounts of information and make it possible to be decoded at much greater speeds.

QR codes were designed initially to be used to track parts built in vehicle manufacturing systems or very large scale (the reason to why Denso, a popular vehicle part manufacturer invented it). But, as of today, its usefulness is found in quite different domains, contradictory to the thoughts of the initial developers. QR codes are used in applications related to mobile phones and also as means of an alternate mechanism to store URLs in a universally decodable format.

Bloggers have found it interesting to have a QR code of their blog (some prefer having the code varied by post as well, as you see in my blog), displayed on the widget bar. Fancy looking QR codes are not easy to generate. There are several popular QR code generators including the Google Chart API. Others are, http://qrcode.kaywa.com and http://www.qrcode.es. This blog uses the latter.

Benefits of using QR codes is the possibility to print the image on some form of media (paper, magazine, contact card etc.) and have a camera phone take a photograph of that image and automatically redirect to that location, using a QR code reader application along with a suitable web browser. Thus the usefulness is immense. For instance, if you have a QR code reader, sharing your favorite blog post with a friend is as simple as sending him an image of your QR code generated using the URL.

Microsoft Committers at Apache Software Foundation

Microsoft through out the past as seen by many has been a strong opponent to the Open Source community, as it being one such company who believed 100% in the commercial aspects and development of software and related infrastructure (including services, support, add-ons and extensions etc.). However, along with the drastic change of perception, where clearly marked development models and interactions of software are now void, and rather moving towards a more globalized system including involvement of varied disciplines, Microsoft too have decided to make their move into the Open Source territory.

The change might seem rapid and sudden to some, but not to those who've been having a careful eye of the recent changes in the industry (more info here). My two previous posts (Microsoft Funds ASF, and WSO2 @ Tech.Ed 2008) of how Microsoft approached true Open Source provides a solid justification to this fact. The greatest question presented by many is whether 2008 is the turning point which breaks the prolonged and greatly spoken barrier between Open Source and Commercial worlds of software.

I was amazed to see this post which introduced the first ever committers from Microsoft to the Apache Software Foundation, who'd perhaps be the first ever contributors to broader Open Source in a manner that is publicly aware. In my personal opinion this unfolds a new era in the entire industry of IT, Systems and Software. The Apache Software Foundation is also a much admired community by many due to its openness and true contribution to create a world of freedom to use software unlike most other entities that promote the same.

The entire Open Source community would un-doubtfully be looking forward to further involvement and contribution by not only Microsoft, but also several other commercial strongholds.

Does Technorati Do the Right Thing?

Technorati is an internet search engine that indexes blogs (over 100 million) and tagged social media (over 250 million), and claims to be the world's best blog index. The Technorati claims have been criticized by many and at the same time acknowledged by many as well. An open source based development team with several active developers is what keeps Technorati going despite heavy competition from search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

However, certain aspects of Technorati's model seem very much questionable. For instance, Technorati displays each blog indexed as a part of their website (http://technorati.com/blogs/..) and to a certain extent makes use of others work to increase the number of their pages, and thereby the number of visitors to their pages; improving the website's overall ranking and advertising revenue.

Another fact is that Technorati actually displays each post appearing on publicly visible blogs within their site and display some advertisements based on the content appearing on those particular pages. The advertisements displayed may be purely random, but the content appearing on the page seems to influence at least one such add appearing in many occasions. You can give this a try (make sure to check around 20-30 different blogs/posts instead of making conclusions based on a few).

Whatever the scenario, Technorati does make some amount of money through these advertisements posted on their website (either contextual or not). Also, even members (people who have user accounts) of Technorati can't decide whether or whether not to turn off these adds, and Technorati's making money out of your blog/post is beyond the control of an ordinary individual.

Why this is wrong is a good question. Some bloggers do allow use, re-use or re-distribution of posted content for commercial purposes. But, some don't. There are blog licenses specifically designed to enforce this requirement. The Creative Commons Non-commercial licenses are a good example. These licenses restrict the use of posted content for commercial purposes (read section 4.b of this license which is one of the least restrictive variants).

But, as of today Technorati still does not have a mechanism where they only advertise based on content appearing on blogs that allow use of content for commercial purposes. The correct way to go would be therefore to refrain from advertising on all blogs until they come up with a scheme that is intelligent enough to account for this requirement or pay compensation to affected bloggers. But, sadly Technorati is not doing it in the correct way, and thereby violating the free-right of a blogger to enforce a license that does not allow use of content for commercial purposes.