WSO2 SOA Workshop in Santa Clara - 3rd Nov. 2009

SOA Workshop - 3rd November, Santa Clara

What is an IDL?

IDL stands for Interface Definition Language or Interface Description Language. IDL is a specification language used to describe interfaces of software components in a language-neutral way enabling communication between software components that do not share a language. Two heterogeneous components can talk to each other with the aid of an IDL.

The best known IDL is WSDL (stands for Web Services Description Language) that is used in Web services. A WSDL enables a Web client written using WSO2 WSF/C++ talk to a Web service written using WSO2 WSAS. In the Web services world, interoperability is a major concern and WSDL is one of the key things that enable Web services interoperability.

MIDL is another well known text-based interface description language developed by Microsoft, based on DCE/RPC IDL. Its compiler is also called MIDL, that generates source files looking at a .idl file. The MIDL compiler and the components of the RPC development environment are installed when you install the Windows SDK.

Another IDL framework is Facebook's Thrift, an RPC framework developed at Facebook (now an open source project in the ASF Incubator) for efficient and reliable communication across programming languages. The implementation of Thrift is described in this paper.

Writing "bug-free" code is impossible?

I fixed a bug in some piece of code a couple of days back. Well ... fixing bugs is a part of our job so what's the big deal? Its nothing to boast about. Correct ... from that perspective, its nothing special. Anyway the interesting point is, this was found in a code base known to be matured, which is more than 7 years old and has been running on hundreds of systems for a long time now. On the other hand, this system claims to have a comprehensive test suite that assures bug-free code.

This was a kind of bug we may hardly find interesting. A conditional thread wait that occurs sporadically on the server when a couple of clients run for a long time (whew!).

This reminds me something I heard at school ... "its impossible to write bug-free code!". I did not realize what this really means until I fixed this show-stopper in a "very stable" system that serves highly critical business requirements.

Effective SOA Governance with the WSO2 Governance Registry

Governance has become the hot topic in SOA over the past year. As companies SOA usage becomes real, widespread and line-of-business, the requirement to ensure that the systems are properly governed has emerged as the number one concern for SOA adopters.
In this webinar, Paul Fremantle, CTO and Co-founder of WSO2, will explain the challenges of SOA governance and show a clear and simple approach that demystifies this complex topic.
Paul will demonstrate how simple effective strategies can make a measurable difference to the effectiveness of a SOA-based Enterprise Architecture.
In addition, Paul will introduce the WSO2 Governance Registry 3.0 and describe how this software can help implement SOA Governance in your organization.

Title:
Effective SOA Governance with the WSO2 Governance Registry

Date:
Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Time:
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT

Meet Dr.Sanjiva Weerawarana and Paul Fremantle on Web panel

Dr.Sanjiva Weerawarana and Paul Fremantle, the Web service pioneers, will be hosting a Web panel this Thursday at 9am PDT. They will be discussing how and why componentization could help nurture your enterprise SOA middleware architecture.

Please feel free to join in an get your questions, concerns answered by the two Web service pioneers.

Find more on this event here.

Want to know how to Deploy a Web service on WSO2 WSAS and Secure it with Username Token policy?

In this screencast, Charitha explains how you could deploy a Web service on WSO2 WSAS and secure it with a username token policy.