Newest Release of WSO2 Carbon Lean Middleware Brings Advances in High Availability, Performance and Security for Enterprise SOAs

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--WSO2 today announced the newest release of WSO2 Carbon, the award-winning, fully componentized middleware platform, which is based on the popular OSGi specification. WSO2 Carbon 3.2 continues to redefine the state-of-the-art in middleware by providing a cohesive platform that adapts to the specific needs of each enterprise IT project—locally and in the cloud. The latest version, available today includes:

“The latest release of our comprehensive and lean WSO2 Carbon middleware platform once again demonstrates that IT professionals can combine the flexibility to adapt and innovate and meet the rigorous demands of critical business-to-business and business-to-consumer applications—on-premise and in the cloud.”

WSO2 Carbon 3.2 core framework, offering new and enhanced features for high availability, performance and security that support all 12 Carbon-based middleware products.
WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 ESB) 4.0, featuring a new relay transport that can deliver a 30% to 50% performance improvement for low-latency SOA routing, depending on the workload.
WSO2 Governance Registry 4.0, adding support for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV), Java Content Repository (JCR) API, and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) version 3.

In conjunction with WSO2 Carbon 3.2, WSO2 also is expanding the middleware platform with the addition of two new products: WSO2 Message Broker and WSO2 Complex Event Processing Server. (For more information on these products, see the press release also dated June 22, 2011.)

All WSO2 Carbon products are 100% open source and available as both downloadable software and virtual machine images. Because the WSO2 Stratos cloud platform builds on and extends WSO2 Carbon, developers who use the new product versions to build applications and services also can seamlessly migrate them to private clouds, public clouds or cloud hybrid environments.

“For enterprise developers and systems integrators, achieving high performance, availability and security for mission-critical applications has sometimes come at the cost of complex, rigid systems that inhibit agility,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO. “The latest release of our comprehensive and lean WSO2 Carbon middleware platform once again demonstrates that IT professionals can combine the flexibility to adapt and innovate and meet the rigorous demands of critical business-to-business and business-to-consumer applications—on-premise and in the cloud.”

WSO2 Carbon 3.2 Core Framework

WSO2 Carbon 3.2 builds on the proven performance of WSO2’s award-winning service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform, which acts as an Eclipse-like framework for servers and features 12 integrated products based on more than 150 hot pluggable components. Using WSO2’s lean middleware platform, enterprise IT teams can focus on integrating systems and building new processes and applications instead of struggling with the rigid boundaries and complexity of proprietary middleware platforms.

The WSO2 Carbon core framework provides all WSO2 middleware products with a consistent set of enterprise-class management, security, clustering, logging, statistics, tracing, and other capabilities. With WSO2 Carbon 3.2, the framework adds cluster synchronization management to enhance high availability. This offers the ability to modify configurations—such as endpoint addresses, mediation flows and business process workflows—at runtime and automatically update all nodes in the system. All Carbon-based services then automatically learn about and apply changes to new request without having to restart.

Other new features in the WSO2 Carbon 3.2 framework are:

Built-in transaction manager to support distributed transactions, provide Java Transaction API (JTA) support, and eliminate the need for developers to rely on a third-party JTA.
Cache-backed registry and support for distributed and replicated caching for both high performance and high availability.
Embedded Apache Directory Server (ApacheDS), the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) compliant user store, to enhance user management.
Kerberos authentication protocol support, which allows nodes communicating over a non-secure network to securely prove their identity.
Enhanced support for the Security Assertion Mark-up Language (SAML) 2.0 for enabling single sign-on across the entire platform.
Support for Tomcat 7.0.14, which includes the StuckThreadDetectionValve to identify long-running requests, and Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) support for the JMXRemoteLifecycleListener.

Version 4.0 of WSO2 ESB and WSO2 Governance Registry

Along with the enhanced core framework, the WSO2 Carbon 3.2 platform also offers new versions of several middleware products that run on it.

WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus 4.0 provides a lightweight mediation platform that is based on and enhances the open source Apache Synapse ESB and is designed for the demands of high-volume SOA implementations. Earlier versions of WSO2 ESB are now running up to 1 billion transactions per day in some customer deployments. Through the addition of a new relay transport, WSO2 ESB 4.0 enables the ability to improve on that performance by another 30% to 50%, depending on the workload.

Because WSO2 ESB 4.0 is now based on Apache Synapse 2.0, it inherits all the features of this open source ESB. Among these are a fine-grained configuration model, hot deployment and hot update support for configuration artifacts, priority-based mediation support, and comprehensive eventing capabilities via WS-Eventing support. Also new with the latest WSO2 ESB version are support for the HL7 transport protocol, the ANSI standard for electronically exchanging information between healthcare systems, as well as templates for connecting sequences and endpoints.

WSO2 Governance Registry 4.0 is a structured registry and repository featuring comprehensive SOA lifecycle management support. Version 4.0 adds support for widely adopted standards, including WebDAV to facilitate collaboration, JCR to manage formal code review, UDDI XML-based registry, and the OpenEdge Advanced Business Language 10.2B fourth-generation programming language. Also new in WSO2 Governance Registry 4.0 are improvements to the governance model with WS-Eventing, notifications, versioning, and classifications.

Other enhanced middleware products available with WSO2 Carbon 3.2 are:

WSO2 Data Services Server 2.6 adds the ability to handle distributed transactions, adds user-defined type (UDT) support, handles complex results and scheduled tasks, and provides improved support for boxcarring and batch requests.
WSO2 Business Activity Monitor (WSO2 BAM) 1.3 adds customizable reports along with improved data publisher performance and BAM dashboard.
WSO2 Business Rules Server 1.2 features the ability to publish and manage rules as a service, use rules as a mediator to route messages based on the rules and then transform the messages, and support Drools by default—with an option to plug in any JSR 94 compatible rules engine.
WSO2 Identity Server 3.2 enhances support for the OASIS eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) with an XACML editor for the Policy Administration Point, support for multiple Policy Information Points, and improved policy test user interface. Also new are two types of Security Token Service support, including custom security policy and bearer subject confirmation.
WSO2 Application Server 4.1 provides a new Server Roles Management feature and built-in data services support, and offers improvements to the SOAP Tracer and Service listing page.
WSO2 Business Process Server (WSO2 BPS) 2.0.3 features an expanded BPS monitoring dashboard to monitor long-running instances and includes several new gadgets to summarize processes within WSO2 BPS, as well as improved support for clustering processes.
WSO2 Gadget Server 1.3.1 portal adds a searchable gadget repository, performance optimization in dashboard and gadget loading, enhanced UI, and improved gadget source editor.
WSO2 Mashup Server 2.3, as with all WSO2 Carbon middleware, inherits the core framework functionality in version 3.2.

Availability and Support

WSO2 Carbon middleware products are available today as software downloads and as WSO2 Cloud Virtual Machines running on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), or VMware ESX. As fully open source solutions released under the Apache License 2.0, they do not carry any licensing fees. WSO2 offers a range of additional service and support options, including evaluation support, a special QuickStart^SM consulting program, development support, and production support.

About WSO2

WSO2 is the lean enterprise middleware company. It delivers the only complete open source enterprise SOA middleware stack purpose-built as an integrated platform to support today’s heterogeneous enterprise environments—internally and in the cloud. WSO2’s service and support team is led by technical experts who have proven success in deploying enterprise SOAs and contribute to the technology standards that enable them. For more information, visit http://wso2.com and the WSO2 OxygenTank developer portal at http://wso2.org, or check out WSO2 on the WSO2 Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and FriendFeed.

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