"Mashups are the rock stars of personal productivity..." starts the press release on WSO2's session at SOAWorld 2008.
Talking about "Mashups - Bringing Springtime to Your SOA" is Jonathan Marsh, the visionary behind the WSO2 Mashup Server who is now WSO2's VP of Business Development, but still very much a Mashupper at heart! If you're in the area or already at SOAWorld and want to learn how to improve your SOA, increase productivity and enjoy doing it, don't miss this!
When: Thursday, November 20, 2:20-3:05 p.m.
Where: SOAWorld 2008, Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, CA
While on the subject of Rock Stars. rumor has it that Nemesis have made it to the finals of OnStage. Hope to be there to see them win!
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Friday, November 7, 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Why I'm glad Obama won
No, It's got nothing to do with the party he represents. I'm not a democrat or republican, I'm not even American!
Neither do I think there will be any direct or immediate benefit to me. As a Software Engineer in Sri Lanka I'm not overjoyed when someone talks about not giving tax breaks to US companies that outsource; if he actually does that he's probably going to make things worse for the IT industry here, not better!
It's not the whole person-of-color thing either. Yes, I have dark brown skin, but wasn't happy when Lewis Hamilton became Formula One World Champ this year and hate Timo Glock for making him that! From the beginning Lewis came across as such a media wh**e, to me he's almost like Paris Hilton but with real talent. I didn't celebrate the first black formula one champion's victory.
Why then?
It's because whether the rest of us like it or not America has the world's biggest economy and most powerful military and it's better for everybody if someone with a little intelligence is in charge.
It's because this time the Americans seem to have kept the problems their country is facing in mind in the voting booth, and chosen the pair of candidates who seemed to have the better solution, instead of the ones who said "What problems? America is awesome and we're more religious, patriotic and real-American, so vote for us!" Gives us all hope!
It's because Obama can and does inspire; I just watched his 2004 keynote and yesterday's acceptance speeches and they actually motivated me, someone completely outside his target audience, and got me believing in the change that's coming. Hey, he's got me writing this post, so I can only imagine the effect he'll have on actual Americans as their president!
I've always had a lot of respect for Putin; ex. secret agent, Judo black belt, got a country back on it's feet from the brink of collapse and so on. Suddenly America has a cool president too! Damn, now everybody's gonna want one!
Neither do I think there will be any direct or immediate benefit to me. As a Software Engineer in Sri Lanka I'm not overjoyed when someone talks about not giving tax breaks to US companies that outsource; if he actually does that he's probably going to make things worse for the IT industry here, not better!
It's not the whole person-of-color thing either. Yes, I have dark brown skin, but wasn't happy when Lewis Hamilton became Formula One World Champ this year and hate Timo Glock for making him that! From the beginning Lewis came across as such a media wh**e, to me he's almost like Paris Hilton but with real talent. I didn't celebrate the first black formula one champion's victory.
Why then?
It's because whether the rest of us like it or not America has the world's biggest economy and most powerful military and it's better for everybody if someone with a little intelligence is in charge.
It's because this time the Americans seem to have kept the problems their country is facing in mind in the voting booth, and chosen the pair of candidates who seemed to have the better solution, instead of the ones who said "What problems? America is awesome and we're more religious, patriotic and real-American, so vote for us!" Gives us all hope!
It's because Obama can and does inspire; I just watched his 2004 keynote and yesterday's acceptance speeches and they actually motivated me, someone completely outside his target audience, and got me believing in the change that's coming. Hey, he's got me writing this post, so I can only imagine the effect he'll have on actual Americans as their president!
I've always had a lot of respect for Putin; ex. secret agent, Judo black belt, got a country back on it's feet from the brink of collapse and so on. Suddenly America has a cool president too! Damn, now everybody's gonna want one!
Monday, November 3, 2008
Mashup Screencast 3: Service Composition
In this, the last of his original trilogy of screencasts, Jonathan continues and concludes the example he used in the two previous installments, by explaining service composition via-a-vis the WSO2 Mashup Server.
One inherent advantage of using web services is the ability to compose or orchestrate and the screencast shows how easy it is to do this using the WSO2 Mashup Server. You'll learn how to use auto-generated stubs to access other services that you wish to compose, manipulate the response from an operation using E4X and schedule periodic service invocation using our implementation of setTimeout function.
As usual, if you don't have the bandwidth to watch the high-res version, you can view the YouTube clip below instead.
One inherent advantage of using web services is the ability to compose or orchestrate and the screencast shows how easy it is to do this using the WSO2 Mashup Server. You'll learn how to use auto-generated stubs to access other services that you wish to compose, manipulate the response from an operation using E4X and schedule periodic service invocation using our implementation of setTimeout function.
As usual, if you don't have the bandwidth to watch the high-res version, you can view the YouTube clip below instead.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
It's the year 2058
The world is back to bartering because everybody gave up on the IMF, exchange rates and money in general when it was discovered that the economy of Zimbabwe, with inflation of 11 million percent, was actually healthier than that of Iceland!
Terrorism does not exist in the new economy because it turns out no terrorist organization had ever created a product or provided a service of any value to anybody. Ditto for pickpockets and people engaged in petty theft. They have all died of starvation.
With the banking system gone, most politicians have very short careers as the corrupt are easily identified. It's not easy to hide 300 cows that suddenly stop in your backyard on the way to a neighboring farm; sending them to Switzerland is not an option.
All research is in the hard sciences as no farmer will feed someone who intends to pay for three square meals a day for two years with "The largest prime number ever"!
Wars are still fought, but only to gain territory or resources. People will not fight to defend an ideology because when it's 'Grow food or Die' the other person's beliefs seem quite acceptable.
Everybody speaks, reads and writes Chinese. Computer programming is taught at literature classes as writing an if-then-else statement in ideograms is closer to haiku than C++.
A significant portion of Hollywood's revenue comes from South Asia. The Oscars now present 'best hero', 'best villain' and 'best comedic character' awards.
'Heroes' season 132 is playing and features new characters that can talk to molluscs and fish, send text messages while driving drunk and write bug free software. All of them are long lost siblings of Peter Petrelli.
Terrorism does not exist in the new economy because it turns out no terrorist organization had ever created a product or provided a service of any value to anybody. Ditto for pickpockets and people engaged in petty theft. They have all died of starvation.
With the banking system gone, most politicians have very short careers as the corrupt are easily identified. It's not easy to hide 300 cows that suddenly stop in your backyard on the way to a neighboring farm; sending them to Switzerland is not an option.
All research is in the hard sciences as no farmer will feed someone who intends to pay for three square meals a day for two years with "The largest prime number ever"!
Wars are still fought, but only to gain territory or resources. People will not fight to defend an ideology because when it's 'Grow food or Die' the other person's beliefs seem quite acceptable.
Everybody speaks, reads and writes Chinese. Computer programming is taught at literature classes as writing an if-then-else statement in ideograms is closer to haiku than C++.
A significant portion of Hollywood's revenue comes from South Asia. The Oscars now present 'best hero', 'best villain' and 'best comedic character' awards.
'Heroes' season 132 is playing and features new characters that can talk to molluscs and fish, send text messages while driving drunk and write bug free software. All of them are long lost siblings of Peter Petrelli.
Monday, October 27, 2008
WSO2 ESB Webinar
Daniel will be presenting a webinar on using the WSO2 ESB to put together a real world integration tomorrow, the 28th of October 2008. If you've read this post in time, register now!
Why am I blogging about the ESB now? Well, I got a basic training on using it a few weeks back and am now working on an ESB component for Carbon. Although I still do believe that the WSO2 Mashup Server is more fun to work with, I've decided to spend some time on learning about the WSO2 ESB and Synapse, if only to complete my knowledge of the WSO2 Java Stack.
How's that, you ask? Well, the Mashup Server actually runs WSAS under the covers, which in turn is powered by Axis2. We use our Registry internally as our repository for Mashups and meta data and the OpenID and InfoCard authentication options are from our Identity Solution. Since the Mashup Server actually incorporated Data Services from 1.5 onwards, that just left the ESB and Synapse untouched. Truly a MASHUP Server!
So, though I'll continue to learn the internals of our ESB and Synapse, this webinar's about WHAT it can do in the real world and that's something I can't get from just the code. Daniel will start the webinar half an hour before midnight tomorrow night, Sri Lanka time, but given his credentials, even if you're in a timezone like mine, this one's worth losing a little sleep over!
Why am I blogging about the ESB now? Well, I got a basic training on using it a few weeks back and am now working on an ESB component for Carbon. Although I still do believe that the WSO2 Mashup Server is more fun to work with, I've decided to spend some time on learning about the WSO2 ESB and Synapse, if only to complete my knowledge of the WSO2 Java Stack.
How's that, you ask? Well, the Mashup Server actually runs WSAS under the covers, which in turn is powered by Axis2. We use our Registry internally as our repository for Mashups and meta data and the OpenID and InfoCard authentication options are from our Identity Solution. Since the Mashup Server actually incorporated Data Services from 1.5 onwards, that just left the ESB and Synapse untouched. Truly a MASHUP Server!
So, though I'll continue to learn the internals of our ESB and Synapse, this webinar's about WHAT it can do in the real world and that's something I can't get from just the code. Daniel will start the webinar half an hour before midnight tomorrow night, Sri Lanka time, but given his credentials, even if you're in a timezone like mine, this one's worth losing a little sleep over!
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Mashup Screencast 2: The Scraping
This is one sequel you didn't have to wait long for; the second part of the mashup screencast trilogy, Web Scraping, is out. In this episode, Jonathan uses a real world example to teach you the basics of screen scraping.
For the un-initiated, scraping enables you to extract information available in web pages and make it available in a machine consumable form. It's a technique most people want to learn as soon as they start using the WSO2 Mashup Server, because it potentially allows you to use the entire web as your data source.
Spoilers: In the screencast Jonathan teaches you to write a scraper configuration to retrieve the contents of a web page and create a sanitized XML document from it. He then uses 'firebug', a firefox plugin, to view the structure of the web page and help him extract the specific data element he's after from the XML. By the end of the screencast you'll be ready to go out and scrape a few pages yourself!
If you've got good bandwidth, you'll appreciate the hi-res version, but if you don't mind youtube quality, click below.
As before, watch this space for the next installment.
For the un-initiated, scraping enables you to extract information available in web pages and make it available in a machine consumable form. It's a technique most people want to learn as soon as they start using the WSO2 Mashup Server, because it potentially allows you to use the entire web as your data source.
Spoilers: In the screencast Jonathan teaches you to write a scraper configuration to retrieve the contents of a web page and create a sanitized XML document from it. He then uses 'firebug', a firefox plugin, to view the structure of the web page and help him extract the specific data element he's after from the XML. By the end of the screencast you'll be ready to go out and scrape a few pages yourself!
If you've got good bandwidth, you'll appreciate the hi-res version, but if you don't mind youtube quality, click below.
As before, watch this space for the next installment.
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