Release Cycle begins @ WSO2

The WSO2 Incorporated has been a very busy company this May/June, with a number of releases in various open source projects. Ahead of others was released the WSO2 WSF/C 1.3.0 in late May and WSO2 WSF/PHP 1.3.0 (The latest stable release of WSF/PHP is 1.3.2). WSO2 WSF/C didn't see a great deal of feature improvements since the 1.2.0 release early this year but a number of bug fixes, and memory leak fixes. WSO2 WSF/C 1.3.0 ships with Guththila as the default parser which makes WSO2 WSF/C totally 3rd party independent in it's most primitive build.

Meanwhile the WSO2 WSF/PHP team has added a lot of value to their move from 1.2.0 to 1.3.0. The major features introduced are,

1. Schema constructs support improvements for WSDL mode including SimpleType restricitons, ComplexType restrictions/extensions and attributes.
2. WSDL Import support.
3. Support for WSDLs with multiple bindings, API is provided to pick the preferred bindings.
4. wsdl2php code generation improvements to support the improvements done in WSDL mode.
5. HTTP Basic Authentication Support.
6. SOAP Messages with Attachments support (SWA).
7. Custom Security token support.

WSO2's WSF/PHP team did two more releases this June which mainly fixed some bugs related to security, the latest being 1.3.2.

The release with the greatest number of additions was the WSO2 ESB 1.7 adding quite a many features:

1. Support for Hessian binary messages
2. FIX (Financial Information eXchange) protocol transport
3. WS-Reliable Messaging support with WSO2 Mercury
4. Ability to stop, re-start and gracefully shutdown the ESB through JMX
5. Integrated WSO2 Registry shipped, with ability to connect to a remote WSO2 Registry
6. Support for re-usable database connection pools for DB report/lookup mediators
7. Support for GZip encoding and HTTP 100 continue
8. Natural support for dual channel messaging with WS-Addressing
9. Cluster aware sticky load balancing support
10. Non-blocking streaming of large messages at high concurrency with constant memory usage
11. Support for an ELSE clause for the Filter mediator
12. Ability to specify XPath expressions relative to the envelope or body
13. Support for separate policies for incoming/outgoing messages
14. Support for a mandatory sequence before mediation
15. New Router mediator
16. Ability to re-deploy proxy services

In addition to the WSO2 ESB, the WSO2 WSAS 2.3 was released adding,

1. Improved interoperability
2. Improved Data Services support
3. Various bug fixes to Apache Axis2, Apache Rampart & WSAS
4. WSO2 Mercury Integration - A new WS-RM Implementation

The last four weeks at WSO2 has been quite hectic, with also an Axis2 training session currently being held.