WSO2 Enterprise Integrator 6.5.0 Released

We are pleased to announce the availability of the 6.5.0 release of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator. This release includes some long-awaited feature improvements and major enhancements to the tooling distribution. Let's see some of the highlights of this release.

WSO2 Integration Studio

WSO2 Integration studio is the redesigned and revamped tooling distribution. With this release, we are introducing significant improvements to our developer experience. 

• WSO2 Integration Studio includes built-in JDK distribution so that you will not need to install or configure a java distribution anymore.
• New theme, icons, tool palette improvements such that screen space is utilized to the maximum.
• New property windows with build in selection options so that most of the settings can be selected, instead of configuring.
• Ability to export the artifacts as docker images and one-click deployment option to wso2 integration cloud
• Built-in micro integration runtime to quickly test your integration artifacts from the IDE itself.
• Simulation capability to test the data mapping and transformation functionality at the time of artifact development

Go download the Integration Studio and experience the improvements yourself.

WSO2 Micro Integrator

We are releasing Micro Integrator profile as a separate downloadable distribution from this release onwards.

Micro Integrator is a smaller runtime of the larger Integrator runtime and includes only the essential features to support integration capabilities.

• Hence micro integrator has <5s startup time and ideal for docker/kubernetes based deployments.
• the key advantage of the micro integrator is that you can deploy the artifacts developed for Integrator with minimum changes on the micro integrator and get your integrations running. 
• If you are already a user of WSO2 Enterprise Integrator, its time to check out the micro integrator since this thin runtime will provide you with the additional deployment flexibility you need.

For other runtimes, we have introduced bug fixes and security fixes and contains some of the feature additions such as property group mediator, improved REST support for data services and so on.

So if you have not checked out the Enterprise Integrator 6.5.0 release, its time to give it a try.

Also, we are hosting an Integration tooling focused webinar series from this week onwards and do check it out. 

The open source ESB

Open Source is associated with most software products nowaday and middleware are no exceptions.

As a middleware user, how does open source benefit you? .

1. Being open source means, you do not have to buy a commercial license to use the software.

2. There will be regular updates, which means, you can keep your deployment up to date with respect to security flows etc.

3. Open source means, there is a definite cost advantage, when it comes to total cost of ownership of a software product.


However, most open source middleware products do not come as a fully open source. Sometimes, there is an open source community edition and an enterprise edition and so forth. Hence, WSO2 ESB is one of the truly open source Enterprise Service Bus product.

Learn more about the open source nature of WSO2 ESB from "THE OPEN SOURCE ESB" article.

Benefits of WSO2 ESB

WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus is a battle tested enterprise service bus catering for all your enterprise integration needs. With its new release, we have taken the capabilities of WSO2 enterprise service bus ( ESB ) in to a new level.

 Previously,  we were releasing few products to cater for enterprise integration needs such as data services server ( DSS ) to cater for master data management, business process server (BPS) to cater for business processes / workflows and human interactions, message broker (MB) for enterprise messaging and ESB to provide the bus architecture to interconnect everything.  However, what we identified is that , more often than not, few of these products will be necessary to cater for a given integration use case and it almost always includes ESB. Hence , now we have packaged all the product capabilities into a single package with profiles with many enhancements to each of the profiles.

Following are some of the key benefits of WSO2 ESB.

1. One of the best performing open sources ESB's in the market.

2. A mature product and supports all enterprise integration patterns.

3. Complete feature set to cater for any integration need.

3. Eclipse based IDE support to quickly develop / debug / package /  deploy your integration flows.

4. Build in message tracing and analytics support with analytics profile.

5. Data integration capabilities allowing exposing your data stores as Services and APIs.

6. Message Broker profile provides fully pledged messaging capabilities including JMS 1.1 and JMS 2.0

7. Business Process Profile allows creating workflows and human integrations with BPMN, BPEL and WS-Human Tasks.

8. Consultancy / Support and Services are readily available from WSO2 and WSO2 Partners world wide.

Learn more about WSO2 ESB from follwoing article.


http://wso2.com/library/articles/2017/07/what-is-wso2-esb/

Whats new in Business Process Server 3.6.0

With a release of BPS 3.6.0, we have a whole set of new features added to the business process server.

User substitution capability
====================

One of the main features of this release is the user substitution capability provided by BPS. It allows the users to define a substitution for a period of absence. ( For example , a task owner going on vacation). When the substitution period starts, all the tasks assigned will be transferred to the substituted user. Any new user tasks created against the user will be automatically assigned to the substitute as well.

See more at https://docs.wso2.com/display/BPS360/Working+with+BPMN+User+Substitution


JSON and XPath-based data manipulation capability.
===========================
When writing a Business Process,  it is necessary to manipulate the data we are dealing with various forms. These data manipulations include, extracting data, concatenating, conversions ect. Often, we would be dealing with eitXML xml or json messages for our workflows. Hence we are introducing the JSON and XML data manipulation capabilities with this release.

See more at https://docs.wso2.com/display/BPS360/XML+and+JSON+variable+support

Instance data audit logs
==================
With BPS 3.6.0, we are introducing the ability to search, and view BPMN process instances from BPMN explorer UI. In addition to that, it will show a comprehensive audit information with respect to process instances data.

See more at https://docs.wso2.com/display/BPS360/Monitoring+a+BPMN+Process

Enhanced BPEL process visualiser.
=========================
In addition to that, we are introducing enhanced BPEL process visualiser with BPS 3.6.0.

Human Tasks Editor
===============
We are also introducing WS-Human Tasks editor with developer studio. With this editor, you will be able to implement a human tasks package for business process server with minimum effort and time.

See more at https://docs.wso2.com/business-process-server/Working+with+BPS+Artifacts

In addition to above main features, there are many bug fixes and security fixes included in BPS 3.6.0 release.

How to install oracle XE 11 on Mint

Found this awesome tutorial on installing oracle XE on Linux Mint.

https://mikesmithers.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/installing-oracle-11gxe-on-mint-and-ubuntu/

Building Business Process Server from Source

Building WSO2 Business Process Server (BPS) from source is quite straight forward. Let's look at how you can compile wso2 business process server using the source code.

Prerequisite

1. You need to have Oracle JDK 1.7 or above (preferably 1.8) installed on your machine.

2. You need to have apache maven ( 3.0.5 ) installed 

Understanding and building BPS Dependencies.

1. Apache ode wso2 fork

2. Activiti 

First, you need to build the Apache ODE fork. 

Clone the github repo https://github.com/wso2/wso2-ode and build it. 

~/work/wso2-ode $ mvn clean install

Since Activiti consists of a large number of dependencies, we have converted it into a single OSGI bundle. 

Clone the following repo and build activiti-all bundle.

https://github.com/wso2/orbit/tree/master/activiti-all

~/work/orbit/activiti-all/5.21.0.wso2v1 $ mvn clean install

Building Carbon Business Process Component

Carbon Business Process component contains the source code for the integration layers and the other functionality we have implemented on top of the code of ODE and Activiti implementations. 

Clone and build the business process component repository. 

https://github.com/wso2/carbon-business-process/

~/work/carbon-business-process $ mvn clean install 

Now you are ready to build the BPS Product. 

Clone https://github.com/wso2/product-bps repository and build the product. 

~/work/product-bps $ mvn clean install 

You will find the built product at ~/work/product-bps/modules/distribution/target directory.

Take a look into the root poms of each repositories properties section in order to understand how each repository connects to the other repositories. 

Business Process Server 3.5.0 version released

We are pleased to announce the release of WSO2 Business Process server 3.5.0 version.

Following are some of the exciting new features shipped with   BPS.

1. BPMN support.

We have incorporated the popular open source BPMN engine ACTIVITI into business process server. We are providing carbon platform compatible  package deployment methodology, and authentication mechanism for the REST API exposed by the bpmn engine. In addition to that a comprehensive and customizable ui provide very nice user facing web application. Users can use this web application and integrate into their existing UI's in order to provide users with workflow initiation and execution capability.

2. Human Tasks  Explorer UI

Human Tasks explorer provides comprehensive UI for managing human tasks. This UI can be deployed in wso2 app server as well. It provides the task list, task forms , attachments, completed task list, assign, claim, complete, save functionality as well as task search capabilities.

3. WS-Human Tasks form generation support.

This was a much needed capability from ws-human tasks support point of view. Up-to bps 3.5.0, users had to write their own jsps for input, output and response actions which were packaged with human tasks package and the rendering was done within the management console itself. Instead, now you have the capability to define how the UI should be rendered in WSO2 specific rendering format and Human Task Explorer generate the appropriate form necessary for task completion or save activity.

4. Process instance retry capability without bpel events. BPEL Instance view now offers  instance retry capability without having to enable events. Disabling bpel events provide huge performance gain and also reduce the db growth by a significant amount.

In addition to these, there are many other bug fixes that have been done with BPS 3.5.0 release. Hence this is a significant improvement from the previous release in-terms of feature addition as well as capability wise.