Sanjiva Weerawarana's Blog

Congratulations Dr. Chathura Herath!

2011-08-21T17:17:00.000+05:30

It gives me great pleasure to congratulations Chathura Herath on completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University on the topic Programming Abstraction for Resource Aware Stream Processing in Scientific Workflows. Chathura is a student of Prof. Beth Plale.

Chathura was also one of the original members of the Apache Axis2 crew and is now the 4th of the original group of 6 to finish their Ph.D. degrees. He joins Srinath (in WSO2), Jaliya (in Microsoft Research), Eran (heading to Wall Street) to finish off leaving just Ajith (in Wright State) and Deepal (in Georgia Tech) in the pipeline. Chathura is heading towards an academic career.

Are you attending WSO2Con 2011?

2011-08-18T02:41:00.002+05:30

WSO2Con 2011 is happening in Sri Lanka at the awesome Waters Edge Conference Center (just outside the capital Colombo) from Monday, September 12th to Friday, September 16th. Have you signed up yet? If not here are a bunch of reasons to do it NOW!

The Program

The overal agenda is a combination of superb keynotes, talks by users about various solutions / case studies, talks by WSO2 folks about various new and up and coming cool things, couple of superb panels and of course some pre- and post-conference tutorials to help get an overview first and then an indepth understanding of various topics. Here's a circular view of the week:

This year we ran an open call for papers and selected nearly 20 external speakers to present their stories from amongst a large number of submissions. The speakers are coming from more than 10 countries (14 if I remember right) from North America, South America, Europe, Asia (including Sri Lanka, of course) and Australia/NZ. With attendees coming from various other countries too this is a truly global event with one hell of a program.

I would be doing a great dis-service if I didn't highlight our keynote speakers. We have 4 outside keynotes from IBM, eBay, Google and Cognizant. Paul and I are doing keynotes too. These folks who are coming in to give the keynotes are highly accomplished individuals who will undoubtedly have superb stuff to say .. listening to them itself will justify the trip!

The Place

Sri Lanka is one of the hottest tourist destinations in the world today. In one small accessible package, Sri Lanka offers everything from awesome beaches to great surf to archeology to history to mountains to hang gliding to hot air ballooning to just plain going native. After having ended a 30-year horrendous war more than 2 years ago, we're now one of the safest places in the world! Interestingly, while most places in the world are increasing their security levels Sri Lanka is massively opening up.

We still of course have ways to go to build up many key infrastructure aspects in the country. In a way the whole country is under construction right now .. but not in the way that you wouldn't have the best time of your life here! Coming now will save you a lot of bucks too .. tourism in Sri Lanka WILL get much more expensive in the next 5 years!

Certainly don't just take my word for it. Instead, how about:

New York Times says Sri Lanka is the #1 travel destination in the world (2010)
National Georgraphic says Sri Lanka is the 2nd best island in the world (2010) [they're wrong of course and we're number 1 ;-) .. but I do admit Galapagos is incredibly cool]

Who am I to argue with places like New York Times and National Geographic telling you to come to Sri Lanka!

The conference hotel we've chosen is Cinnamon Lakeside in Colombo. This is one of the best (5-star, of course) hotels in Colombo and sits next to the Beira Lake in Colombo. In addition to being a great hotel smack in the middle of Colombo, it also houses several superb restaurants. Do not miss Royal Thai.

The conference itself is being held at the very very cool Waters Edge Conference Center, about 10km (6 miles) out of Colombo. Its a very large facility and is in fact part of a golf course and is home to all the high-end events in Colombo. We will have buses organized to shuttle you to/from the hotel to the conference location.

The People

One of the best things about going to a conference is of course the opportunity to hang out with like minded people .. some of who will end up becoming your buddies for the rest of your life. At WSO2Con 2011 you will have the opportunity to interact with people from 20 countries, people who are total geeks, people who are world famous and of course the people from WSO2 who create and develop the products you love.

In order to make sure you get maximum time to interact and engage with each other we are also organizing several evening events. Don't plan to leave as the sessions finish!

The Deal

We want you to come from wherever you are in the world. At the same time, we realize its not easy to get travel approval these days with an unknown budget to travel to an exotic destination ("you want to go to a conference where?").

So, in order to make that process easier we're offering a complete, soup-to-nuts package that covers everything:

round-trip (economy class) airfare
up to 6 nites hotel accommodation at the conference hotel
all ground transportation in Sri Lanka
all meals within those 6 nights
(oh yeah) a full conference pass including both tutorial days

How much? They are priced based on where you're coming from:

Anywhere from South Asia: $1,900
Anywhere from Europe, Australia or New Zealand: $2,400
Anywhere else in the world (America, Africa, rest of Asia, Arctic region, Antarctica etc.): $2,900

If you've ever paid and attended a 5-day event anywhere in the US you know that you easily spend more than $2,900 for that week all told. This is an incredible value .. even your manager will grok it :). AND you get to spend a week in Sri Lanka as a bonus!

We OF COURSE are hoping lots and lots of folks from Sri Lanka will attend! We don't have airfare included rates for that :) .. you just have to register at the regular rates (and we give a special discount to most LK organizations - government, SLASSCOM members, AMCHAM members, IESL members, etc. etc.).

What are you waiting for? REGISTER NOW and reserve your spot :-).

10 years since returning to Sri Lanka

2011-08-06T21:21:00.000+05:30

Today marks the 10 year anniversary of our returning home to Sri Lanka.

I went to the US in 1985 where I lived for a total of nearly 16 years .. first arriving on August 18, 1985 to go to Kent State University for undergraduate studies. I lived in Kent, Ohio for 4 years, finishing both a BS and an MS, and then moved to West Lafayette, Indiana for 8 years where I was a PhD student at Purdue for 5 years and then visiting faculty for 3 more. Then I joined IBM Research in August 1997 (starting August 4th) and moved to Yorktown Heights, New York and finally left the US on August 4th 2001 and arrived back home on August 6th, 2001. That's 10 years ago today :-).

Wow, 10 years .. time flies when you are having fun!

I remember that there were pieces of airplanes on the ground at the Colombo Airport when we landed - the dreaded LTTE had brazenly attacked the airport just 10 days before that destroying 3 Sri Lankan Airlines planes and damaging 3 more as well as damaging or destroying 26 Airforce aircraft and killing a bunch of people.

What a difference 10 years makes; guns have been silent and peace reigns loudly in Sri Lanka for more than 2 years now. Whether you like the current leadership team in the country or not, we all owe them an incredible debt of gratitude for putting everything aside and destroying the LTTE menace and creating a stable nation so we have (another) chance at becoming what Sri Lanka is capable of becoming.

I was of course still working for IBM Research when I came back .. working remotely from Sri Lanka. I finally quit on April 15, 2005 and started WSO2 a few months later. I started encouraging Sri Lankan developers to contribute to open source projects in fall 2002 and ended up starting the Lanka Software Foundation in early 2003 (along with friend, colleague and mentor Jivaka Weeratunge). LSF was of course instrumental in many projects that ended up in Apache and for Sahana, the tsunami-inspired disaster management system we created. (BTW IBM recently highlighted Sahana in their 100 year celebrations .. very cool!) I also started teaching as a volunteer visiting lecturer at the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University of Moratuwa from around 2002, where many of the brilliant brains that contributed to LSF's projects, and later WSO2, came from. (We of course get brilliant people from many sources now .. but MRT still dominates!)

One of the things I'm really proud of is that so many people have benefitted from the work done in LSF to help get them into grad school for further studies. Counting WSO2 too, there are now more than 25 people in various places doing PhD's in Computer Science. Three have finished so far.

--

Many people have asked me at various times: "Have you ever regretted coming back home?". I can honestly say: NOT EVEN ONCE!

Don't get me wrong- the US was a great country to live in and I will never forget the superb education nor the wonderful experiences and friends I made in my 16 years there. However, this is home and there's nothing like home (for me). I love the fact that I can have some small impact on young people who can help Sri Lanka get ahead in its journey. I love the fact that I am not second class in any way in my home country. I love the fact that my kids are growing up here with roots in their home country - where they end up as adults is their decision, not mine. But at least they have a firm footing here as their home.

Moving back to Sri Lanka is not without its challenges. Many things that are easy in the US are not so easy here. At the same time, many things that are hard in the US are quite easy here. So its always a mixed bag .. what matters is your mindset about the journey: if you are committed to moving back then you can come back. If you are half-hearted and look for problems instead of challenges then you will run back to wherever you attempted to move back from.

I am writing this because I am very very keen to attract Sri Lankans living in other countries to come back home. We need our educated, experienced, connected, knowledgable Lankans to come back home and help us rebuild after the 30 year nightmare that ended 2 years ago. The opportunities here are absolutely amazing and this is the start of a boom period .. now is as good as ever to come back home.

OF COURSE Sri Lanka is not a perfect place. Neither is the US (can you say "debt ceiling"?) nor any other place. The advantage Sri Lanka offers to Sri Lankans is that this is our home. Whatever hard work you do will have tremendous impact. Sri Lanka is a small country .. that means the impact of your work is much more direct and immediate too. Every problem is an opportunity if you take up the challenge!

I, along with Dulith Herath, Founder and CEO of Kapruka.com, along with SL2College (another non-profit project I'm involved in - founded by Nayana Samaranayake) are launching a "come back to Sri Lanka" effort soon. The idea is to help dispel many myths (that traffic is a nighmare, that everything is corrupt, that nothing is easy etc. etc.), get info about jobs and other opportunities, provide accurate and direct information and eventually help people who want to come back make the move and settle down (including things like kids school etc.).

BTW if you're a hardcore passionate techie wanting to come back then I know at least one great place to work ;-).

The last 10 years have been amazingly fantastic for me. The last 6 years have been most special because I have helped create a company that now employees more than 125 people here (and soon more here as well as in the US, UK and some in Europe). Thank you Paul for much of that!

The move was made easier by many many people who helped get settled in, helped get connected to various places and helped in various other ways. You are too numerous to list (and I know I will screw up by missing some key people) but please know that I know you played a crucial role in how well the last 10 years have gone. From the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU.

Congratulations Dr. Eran Chintaka!

2011-07-31T08:03:00.001+05:30

It gives me great pleasure to congratulate Eran Chinthaka on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University on the topic User Inspired Management of Scientific Jobs in Grids and Clouds. His advisor was Prof. Beth Plale.

Eran is of course one of the founding team members of Apache Axis2 in the Lanka Software Foundation. Of the original 6 person core team who created Axis2, he's the 3rd to finish his Ph.D. (joining Srinath (back in WSO2) and Jaliya (in Microsoft Research)) and the other three are getting close to finishing up their PhDs too. Eran worked in WSO2 for a couple of years before leaving for his Ph.D. and I hope that when he finishes his Wall Street stint he'll come back home and join us again :-).

Congratulations Dr. Chinthaka!

Growing the WSO2 business

2011-07-19T14:58:00.000+05:30

I wrote a blog on the WSO2 Corporate Blog on growing WSO2. Check it out!

Cloud players and open source collaboration

2011-05-17T09:29:00.000+05:30

In today's keynote at OSBC RedHat's CEO Jim Whitehurst claimed that even companies like Google, Amazon and other cloud players are always collaborating .. not directly but in the form of collaboration via the various open source projects they build their offerings on.

While that's true to some extent, the reality IMO is that many of these companies end up with forks of key projects such as MySQL or Xen or use extension points to write their own core bits that are not open source and never will be. If you talk to ex-MySQL people they will tell you that while there was a lot of testing and other "low end" contributions by the community, almost no major contributions for MySQL came from random outside users. That is the general sentiment I've heard from most open source organizations, communities and projects and certainly our experience in WSO2 as well. Even in Apache, its usually people who are fairly committed to the project (either by employment, which is most common, or by personal interest/choice) who contribute meaningfully; its very rarely that you get a sizable contribution from an outsider.

In fact, the (ab)use of open source by online services companies like Google etc. is exactly why the AGPL license was created. For the uninitiated, AGPL is a viral license like GPL except that even online hosting is considered "distribution", thereby forcing service providers to ship the source code for any modifications they've done. Personally I'm not a fan of such aggressive tactics to get people to contribute (that's why ALL WSO2 software is Apache licensed) but there are many people who come from the free software mindset, in comparison to the open source mindset, of the FOSS community who are not happy with the Googles of the world not having to share any code at all even though they get a lot out of FOSS.

So IMO Jim's wrong on this- Google and Amazon and other major closed cloud platform players will NOT share anything they absolutely don't have to. As a side-effect, they will not touch any AGPL code because it will force them to be a commodity and that results in loss of key competitive advantages for them.

The FOSS movement is about giving power to the people. Cloud is a major risk for that as the cloud vendors are incentivized NOT to have a common denominator. That's why there's no freedom in the cloud without using a truly open source PaaS and building your own thing on top of it.

Cricket World Cup - kudos to Sri Lanka Cricket

2011-03-28T08:48:00.000+05:30

I had the fortune of landing a ticket for Saturday's quarter final match between Sri Lanka and England. Someone who had 2 grandstand tickets got sick and I was lucky to be asked whether I want it at list price :). At Rs. 4000 each I felt they were pricey but then at the event I met a friend who had paid double that for his ticket! I will comment on the ticket selling process later.

First of all, the stadium atmosphere was just incredibly amazingly fantastically electric and rocking. Being there is nothing like watching at home .. despite being able to see the match poorly, the environment is of course unbeatable. The fact that Sri Lanka gave England a total drubbing was awesome, even though as a result the game became quite non-competitive .. but I'll settle for non-competitive games up to the final and thrilling victory in the final (vs. to have it stolen like the last time).

This post is not about the quarter final match - its about Sri Lanka Cricket, the embattled organization which runs the sport in Sri Lanka.

As most people in Sri Lanka know, the organizers were hammered very very hard in the press before the World Cup started about their preparations, about how the stadiums were completed last minute and about every aspect of team selection to overall management. I'm not an expert on cricket- so I have no useful views on the cricketing aspects and will leave them alone. However, I do want to comment on the overall organization of the event.

I have made it to 3 matches in Colombo - the first was the loss to Pakistan, the second the rained out draw with Australia and the third of course the drubbing of England.

All these were held at the newly refurbished Kettarama Stadium of course- an absolutely AWESOME stadium now! I have been there a few months ago and it was a nightmare to get in and out. Now its a breeze and reminds me of the convenience of getting in and out of Purdue's Mackey Arena (for basketball). Once you are inside, the view is breathtaking. The atmosphere is amazingly electric. Every match was sold out (of course) to a capacity crowd of 35,000+.

I didn't make it to Hambantota for the first match but the news from there was that the brand new stadium there was absolutely amazing as well. The words from a friend (usually a skeptic) was "money well spent".

Same has to be said for Pallekalle in Kandy. That's again a new stadium (or a refurb'ed old ground; not sure) and while its not as built up as Hambantota or Colombo the location is just amazing and all the reports are that the place was fantastic.

There was not a single time in all the matches in Sri Lanka where something went wrong with the logistics. All the comentators have been giving kudos about the venues and the amazing environments offered by them.

I too was caught up in the press vendetta against Suraj Dandeniya (the head of the World Cup organizing team in SLC). While the work was indeed completed last minute it is time to give this gentleman a tip of the hat and acknowledge the amazing work they have done to deliver perfectly for Sri Lanka. Press stories have a way of finding individuals guilty without judge or jury and this vendetta was played out by most of the newspapers in a merciless manner. Maybe Suraj has refused some passes for the press and their buddies? Who knows.

Yes yes I know there's one more match to be played in Sri Lanka. That's the one where Sri Lanka will whack the New Zealanders home :-). I am confident that too will go off without a hitch! At one level "may the best team win" may apply but, honestly, to hell with that .. Sri Lanka has to win to set up an amazing final in India against (most probably) India. Nothing like that victory!

(The NZ team has done amazingly well to get to the semi-finals and they've always stepped up big at the big occasions. Their country also suffered a massive earthquake recently .. only to be overshadowed by an even bigger one. If they go on to winning the tournament they'll again get some all-important PR for the recovery efforts there. To that extent I want NZ to win. Yeah, treacherous.)

Now about those ticket sales.

Fundamentally, this is a no-win situation for the organizers. 35,000 tickets for the match where 500,000 at least would love to watch in person. So no matter what approach is taken, there will be 465,000+ who will be crying foul!

There have been stories about how people stood in line, bought the ticket and turned around and sold it to someone else. I see no way to stop that - and keeping the ticket price low (lowest was Rs. 50 for group stage matches in Colombo) meant that anyone could buy them without any problem - a good thing in general.

Personally I have no issue with blackmarket sales (and I don't understand why they are banned) - the only problem it highlights is that the original ticket was sold too low! Why doesn't Sri Lanka Cricket sell the ticket for Rs. 10,000 if it can get away with it and make more money? Maybe they should've also set up an auction at EBay or something where people can bid and buy tickets at whatever price above the minimum price. No I'm not suggesting doing that for all tickets but rather for a percentage- you give some on a pure lottery, some for those who stand in line .. and the rest to the best price via auction with batches sold daily. I don't understand why they created a secondary market in the first place when they themselves could've run both the primary and secondary markets. Obviously I don't know enough about market economics.

The real problem is that many tickets seem to have been sold only to "known parties". The Colombo powers-that-be who want to watch the matches shouldn't have been able to buy through back channels. If they don't want to stand in line they can certainly afford to buy the tickets on the blackmarket if they want and let some poor guy make some money. Why should these fat cats be able to buy tickets at list?!

When you are at the match (and I went to A lower the first time (Rs. 250), to C upper the second time (Rs. 100) and to the grand stand for the quarter final (Rs. 4000) its clear that most in attendance were way above average in economic terms. In practical terms, that suggests that a lot of blackmarket sales were happening. If someone's a true fan, there's no amount of money that would make them sell the ticket - so the people who sold the tickets were not real fans. Or they were true fans who felt the money was more economically valuable for them than the experience (maybe they had a sick child or needed some home repairs or whatever ..). Or they were savvy businessmen who stood in line and sold the ticket for a profit. The bottom line is that there's no way to prevent normal capitalism from taking place and the value balance ending up wherever it ends up.

So while I too am frustrated I can't get a ticket for the semi-finals, I am only upset about connected people getting tickets at list price through backchannel means. The rest of the system I have no concerns with - and next time (20-20 World Cup next year) I hope Sri Lanka Cricket does a combination of lines, lotteries and auctions to sell the tickets.

Talking about tickets .. anyone have a spare grandstand ticket for the semi final they want to sell me at list price? :-)

Congratulations Dr. Jaliya Ekanayake!

2011-01-01T16:54:00.000+05:30

It gives me great personal pleasure to congratulate Jaliya on completing his Ph.D.in Computer Science from Indiana University in late December. His PhD work was on extending the applicability of Map Reduce to a larger class of problems. The software he developed as part of his work is available at http://iterativemapreduce.org/. Jaliya was a student of Prof. Geoffrey Fox.

Jaliya has already started work at Microsoft Research and works on applying map-reduce and other approaches to solve large scale systems problems.

Jaliya is the second person from the original Apache Axis2 team to complete his Ph.D. after Srinath. Jaliya is the original father of Apache Sandesha, the WS-Reliable Messaging implementation for Apache Axis. He, along with the rest of the original Axis2 crew, laid the foundation for a lot of the technology that WSO2 is built on. The remaining original Axis2 team members (and about 20+ others who have been at WSO2 at one point) are now in the pipeline to complete their Ph.D.'s over the next few years!

Congratulations and best wishes Jaliya for a bright future!

Celebrating 5 years of WSO2

2010-09-13T11:16:00.001+05:30

While our official birthday is August 4th (pretty much a random date that I chose between the various steps of starting that we went through!), this week we’re going to be celebrating our 5 year anniversary with a bunch of events!

The entire WSO2 family has traveled (or are still traveling) to Sri Lanka – Paul is on his way from Emsworth, UK; Paul’s mom from Glasgow (Paul’s late father was of course one of our seed investors and we’re honored to have his mom be with us for this occasion!); Jonathan from Auburn, CA; Mahesh from Sydney, AU; Rebecca Hurst (our PR person, President of KineticPR) from San Francisco, CA; Pradeep Tagare (Intel Capital) from Mumbai, India and last (but never least!) James Clark from Bangkok, Thailand. We’ll miss one 3rd board member Alok Mohan who unfortunately couldn’t make it!

First up is to announce that we’re just about to cross the 100 employee mark! We have a bunch of new folks starting today .. um, yeah, 25 to be exact :). Yes, that’s a HUGE number of and we’re going to be working hard to get everyone properly integrated and settled in!

Actually when you add the 20 or so people on study leave from us working towards their PhD’s in Computer Science, we’re really about 125 employees .. but with the new group we’ll cross the 100 active members count. That’s a major milestone and its great to have it happen in sync with our 5 year anniversary as the new people get to experience our culture right out of the box.

To accommodate all the new people we’ve been doing some major office refurbishment / redesign in Colombo and have also signed up a 2nd location. That is just down the street from where we are at and we will be ceremonially opening that up later today as well! Its been a marathon effort by Udeshika and her team to get all the changes implemented and while its definitely coming down to the wire it looks like it’ll all be ready :). Awesome power of teamwork!

We’ll post some pictures of our offices soon!

Tomorrow (Tuesday 14th) and Wednesday are of course the dates of our first ever WSO2Con Conference!

We have prepared an excellent program for this and have nearly 300 people signed up to attend! We also ran a promo on WSO2 OxygenTank to give a free trip to attend WSO2Con and I’m thrilled to announce that Adam Firestone from SAIC, USA and Jagannath Nori from Inland Revenue, New Zealand were selected! I think Adam landed a few hours ago and Jagannath should be here soon as well. I look forward to meeting them in person soon!

After the conference on Wednesday night, we have organized an invitation-only Gala Dinner for business leaders, senior government officials, senior academics, and the diplomatic community in Sri Lanka to introduce WSO2 to them. I’m amazed at the strong response we’ve had from the top business leaders in Sri Lanka to our invitation! I look forward to presenting a very different kind of company to them :). We have engaged the best musical talent in Sri Lanka to help set the right environment for this event- Ananda Dabare, the lead-violinist of the Colombo Symphony Orchestra and Bhatia & Santush, the best of the best musical group in Sri Lanka!

After the conference and gala dinner we have invited partners and select others attending WSO2Con to participate in a 2-day technical workshop to give them a deep understanding of our entire platform. We have about 25 people participating in that and will have our new team join as well so they will also get a “bootcamp” session!

Finally, on Friday night comes the real celebration :). We have organized a full scale party for the entire WSO2 team, their friends and family, ex-employees etc. to get together and have fun! That’s going to be a (long) night of good food, drink and great live music and lots of dance!

Of course this celebration is nothing but a simple yet important milestone in our journey! WSO2 is really just begun .. and to use Shakira’s Waka Waka words:

You're on the frontline
Everyone's watching
You know it's serious
We're getting closer
This isn’t over

And to the WSO2 team, my message is:

The pressure is on
You feel it
But you've got it all
Believe it

Looking forward to an amazing, memorable week; followed by the next amazing 5 years!

Its not just standalone BPM that is dead!

2010-05-30T16:57:00.007+05:30

There was a thread recently on InfoQ asking whether standalone BPMS is dead.

Yes it is dead.

But, that's not the only standalone thing that is dead! Standalone Business Rules Systems is dead. Standalone Application Servers are dead. Standalone ETL products are dead. Standalone Messaging products are dead. Standalone ESBs are dead. Standalone Enterprise Content Management systems are dead. Standalone Security products are dead. Yes, they're all dead.

They're all dead because customers are tired of being integration companies. What happens when a customer buys one of these standalone BPMS/BRS/ETL/etc. products is that the customer has to figure out how to integrate it to the other standalone products they've bought from other vendors. How does that help the customer's IT shop deliver business value to their organization?

Enterprise problems don't come neatly packaged into BPM problems or Business Rules problems or Data Transformation problems or any one such well defined category. Instead, enterprise problems are complex problems that require an entire repertoire of tools which can be combined nicely to solve the problem at hand. Attempting to build solutions to these complex problems with a single sledgehammer approach is one of the reasons why many IT projects take so long to complete and end up being so expensive.

The customer's IT shop is like the place which maintains the vehicle that the enterprise's IT is. What happens after a few years of taking standalone products and trying to live by their rules (not to mention their expensive consultants) and creating hodge-podge solutions is that the car ends up looking like this:

That's why enterprise middleware needs to be 100% internally self-consistent and fully integrated. Without that, every turn may drive the IT shop into a wall. Behind every dark spot on the road could be a pot hole. Or, at best, the IT shop is not able to drive the car down the freeway with cruise control turned on .. instead its constantly hitting speedbumps.

Don't like that? Well then you need middleware that can scale up and offer exactly the features that you need to solve the problem cleanly. Your IBM/Oracle/Tibco/JBoss middleware can't do that? Well then you have to try WSO2 Carbon based products .. and your car will end up looking like this :-).

The best part of course is that all of our products are 100% open source under Apache license and free for you to use. If you want absolutely world class enterprise support, call us and we'll sell it to you at $8000/server. All very simple.

What is an "open source business"?

2010-05-17T14:04:00.002+05:30

Paul recently wrote a great article on what it really means to be an "open source business." Its now posted on SDTimes! Read it and you'll be able to tell the fakes apart :-).

10 years of SOAP!

2010-04-28T22:33:00.007+05:30

This is a historic week for SOAP .. it was on April 26, 2000 that the SOAP v1.1 specification was published. Then, it was 10 years to the date today that we published IBM SOAP4J, the first ever SOAP implementation!

Wow time flies when you're having fun.

This is a good time for me to remember some of the various milestones that I've been part of in the last 10 years related to SOAP and WS-*, which of course lead me to where I'm now in WSO2. This is a rambling post that I'm writing down to remember some fun things that happened in the last 10 years. If I missed acknowledging anyone that was not intentional! If I misquoted or misrepresented anyone again please accept my apologies.

Matt Duftler, Paco Curbera and I wrote IBM SOAP4J. When Microsoft released SOAP 0.9 back in Nov/Dec 1999, I ended up getting involved with the IBM team that was formulating a "response". That was basically because I was an "XML expert" at the time in IBM as I was one of the representatives on the XSLT Working Group and had done BML (Bean Markup Language, very similar to Spring but several years before Spring) and other various XML things. In other words, I got involved with SOAP pretty randomly :).

Early in 2000 IBM decided to join with Microsoft to help push SOAP. IBM was already working (secretly) with Microsoft on what would eventually become UDDI, so it was a natural thing to do. Before the v1.1 spec came out, I helped refine the drafts and at that time my group in IBM Research started the Java implementation.

(On a side note, before IBM decided to join SOAP, we created an internal alternative .. called SCUM ;-). It (luckily) never saw the light of day!!!)

I was also dead keen to release the source code for it. We worked hard to convince the IBM software group management that IBM would gain a lot by open sourcing the thing .. basically it was a chance to get an implementation out quickly which would allow people to play with it freely without fear. IBM had a process for approving open source contributions (of course). In an incredible chain of events, we managed to start and finish the process (including getting legal & IP clearance) in 3 days .. the code was ready on around April 25th and we took it thru the system and had it ready to go on April 28th! (Matt and I wrote most of the original bits and Paco came on board a bit later .. we had many late nights getting it done on time.)

So on April 28th, exactly 2 days after the spec was released, IBM announced the availability of IBM SOAP4J via alphaWorks, with full source code! I think the code was then under the IBM Public License but I can't remember for sure.

In May 2000, Matt & I attended WWW 9 in Amsterdam. That's where I first met Glen Daniels and also the ever-so-colorful Dave Winer. We also went for an interesting dinner, including a visit to an infamous "coffee shop" as well as stroll down the interesting parts of town! Later Glen was one of the first people to join the Apache SOAP project and became a major contributor very soon. Later of course he would lead Apache Axis, which was the first re-write of the Java SOAP stack.

While the source code was available, the project was still an IBM project - that is, it was not really open source. So then, with a lot of help from Sam Ruby, we ended up donating IBM SOAP4J to form the Apache SOAP project, then under the XML project. That was in June 2000 if I recall correctly.

In the meantime, Matt, Paco & I also came up with an interface description language for SOAP services. The original version was called XIDL and the later version (which was very much like WSDL but even more powerful) was called NASSL (Network Application Service Specification Language). The creation of NASSL had a huge impact on the direction of several Web services specs and the mindset IBM (in particular Don Ferguson, then chief architect of IBM middleware, now CTO of CA) drove into the specs: that the world of SOA was not just about SOAP. In fact Don was our God father .. he was the main guiding hand behind what we were doing.

Microsoft in the meantime published something called SDL (Service Description Language). Then we worked (secretly) with Microsoft to combine SDL with NASSL to form WSDL 1.0 and released it in September 2000. That was my first experience with inter-company techno-political negotiation! Quite fun :). Every time we hit a wall we'd escalate to Don and they'd escalate to Andrew Layman .. and Don & Andrew would have a "parental" meeting and resolve the conflict and the kids would be off playing again. A few months later IBM & Microsoft jointly contributed WSDL 1.1 to the W3C and set it off on the standards path. WSDL 2.0 (of which I was one of the editors and Jonathan Marsh, now VP Bizdev in WSO2, was chair of the working group) would come out much much later .. and unfortunately too late for wide adoption as WSDL 1.1 is with us (forever :-().

In January 2001, the W3C held their infamous Workshop on Web Services. IBM's position paper (written primarily by Don Ferguson) became a roadmap of what we ended up driving towards for the next 5+ years. I was a lowly Research Staff Member in IBM Research at the time, but Don (who was God of IBM Software Group) was an incredible mentor and he gave me opportunities that I can't imagine anyone giving a young kid (yeah I even had some hair). I now try to do that for other people .. probably not as well as Don. Rod Smith, who was then VP of Emerging Technologies in IBM, and an absolute STAR of IBM's executive family, became the spokesperson for IBM's Web services & SOA strategy. Rod is an amazing presenter and can articulate business value in incredible ways. The presentation that IBM gave at that workshop is here. As I made many of the slides (which is evidenced by how boring the slides are) I got my name put on it along with Don & Rod :-). If you read thru the paper and the presentation, you can see much of the WS-* vision laid out there!

In that presentation we had WSEL and WSFL. I was sitting next to Andrew while Rod was presenting and I remember his leaning over me and asking whether these were specs or placeholder names. I think I gave a mixed answer .. and that set us up to working on parallel specs and having to merge them. That's how WSFL and XLANG came separately and got combined into BPEL4WS.

It was during this time that I met Dr. Frank Leymann, Distinguished Engineer in IBM and head of IBM workflow technologies. Frank taught me how to spell workflow and gave Paco and me the opportunity to work with himself, Mark Thomas-Schmidt and others on WSFL. Paco and I got involved because we had in the meantime expanded BML work to add recursive composition and we convinced Frank that in addition to being a flow language, WSFL needed to define a service itself .. that is, it had to be a recursive composition language. WSFL didn't quite get that right but we got it right in BPEL4WS. Working on that spec was an absolute joy and a learning experience for me. Frank, Dieter Roller (now retired from IBM), Satish Thatte (Microsoft) and Jo Klein (Microsoft), Paco and I met a bunch of times to work out issues and merge XLANG and WSFL. Oh yes we needed parently supervision multiple times in that process too :-). Eventually we published the spec and my group of course did an immediate implementation (IBM BPWS4J, first impl of BPEL4WS) and had it ready on alphaWorks.

WSEL eventually got done as WS-Policy and then of course various policy domains (WS-SecurityPolicy etc.) got defined.

On the Apache front, there was incredible progress too. Apache SOAP was really a quick hack type thing. It used DOM, had a relatively constrained type mapping model and really had no support for SOAP headers. Glen lead the thinking about how to re-do it resulting in a large f2f meeting in Washington DC somewhere in December 2001 (I think). After that Glen and a few others started hacking hard on Axis which shipped sometime in 2002 and instantly became the #1 SOAP implementation in Java. Axis had its issues but it was dramatically more powerful than Apache SOAP and quite a bit more performant too.

I had run into Paul Fremantle in 1998 or so when he wrote an IBM Redbook on XML and XSL processing. I had also done BSF (Bean Scripting Framework, which is now part of the JDK as JSR 223 and is an Apache project). Sometime in 98/99 and Matt Duftler and I integrated BSF into the IBM JSP engine to make JSP pages multi-lingual. One of the languages we integrated to BSF was XSLT (via then LotusXSLT which became Apache Xalan) and Paul ran into this while talking about how to do XML and XSLT in JSP pages. He was either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid to even try that stuff at the time (!!!) but we started working together as he kept calling saying "the shit don't work"!

After Paul returned to UK, Paul took BML and made an EJB version of it called EJBML. I think we released the spec and code as part of BML but I can't find it any more. EJBML basically was inversion of control for EJB applications .. without us knowing that's what it was! Concepts from EJBML and BSC (Bean Scripting Components, which we even filed a patent for .. before I realized what patents were and stopped filing them) all went into SCUM (the SOAP competitor which never saw the light of day).

Paul then created Generalized Services Framework (GSF) which eventually got morphed and came out as WSIF - Web Services Invocation Framework, which later became another Apache project. WSIF was a runtime cousin of WSDL - had a pluggable binding model and standard API to interact with services, no matter how the wire interaction looked like. In fact, Paul and I wrote a CACM article in 2002 where we talked about taking COBOL stuff and making it into services thru WSIF. Interestingly, IBM actually shipped support for that in the early Process Server versions (which used WSIF for all invocations).

WSIF later became major input to JSR 109.

I also remember getting a request in early 2002 (approximately) saying "write up a JSR to standardize everything around WSDL and Java" (IBM and Sun were fighting at the time and the way the Java Community Process was set up, he who lead the expert group controlled all). That's what lead to JSR 110 - Java API for WSDL. Unfortunately, we didn't include language binding into that JSR .. and later Sun took control of that and went onto defining JAX-RPC JSR 101, lead by my friend Roberto Chinnici.

I moved back to Sri Lanka in August 2001, while still keeping my IBM Research job in New York. Around that time, I had convinced myself that implementing WS-* by layering it in front of J2EE as IBM was doing was the wrong way to do it. So in December 2002 (2001?) I remember giving a presentation to Rod Smith and David Bolokker suggesting a total rewrite of the entire WebSphere platform around XML and SOAP. Rod always thought WebSphere was too bloated and wanted to redo it but never could get resources to do it. Hey we were in research .. so no one could tell us what not to do :). So we started a project called the "Colombo Project" (because I was living in Colombo) which was to build a service execution platform from scratch.

In the meantime, I had helped start the Lanka Software Foundation in Sri Lanka to help Sri Lanka developers contribute to open source (not use FOSS but manufacture it). As I was working in Web services heavily, I knew where there were opportunities to write code. Axis/C++ was the first project done by LSF - 4 developers (donated by JKCS and Virtusa), 4 Pentium3 machines with 512MB RAM and a lab at Univ of Colombo due to the vision of (late) Prof. V.K. Samaranayake)).

In 2003 (I think) LSF took 4 Univ of Moratuwa interns to do a project. The task I assigned them was to take Apache Axis and rewrite it using a pull architecture (using Alek Slominski's XmlPull library) and make it run 10x faster. The team consisted of Srinath Perera (now Dr. & an architect in WSO2), Dimuthu Leelaratne (now a senior member of WSO2's security team Jeykumaran Chandrasegaram (now in UK) and Vairamuthu Thayapavan (working in Sri Lanka).

They delivered and the resulting effort, AxisMora, was contributed in 2003 to Apache Axis to form the seed for the Axis2 effort.

LSF applied for a grant from the Swedish International Development Agency and got $100k for a 1year effort. That's what funded the original Apache Axis2 team in Sri Lanka. We started the Axis2 effort with a f2f meeting in Colombo where Glen, Paul, Dims and various other people came to help do the initial design of Axis2. Srinath (who had just graduated) lead the effort along with several others (all of who are now doing PhDs in the US!). Axis2 too has been an incredible success with it now being the most popular Web services platform in Java.

So going back to the Colombo project, we got a working system done sometime in 2004. Paul was the software group supporter for that project and was actively involved with us. In September 2004 I took Colombo thru the entire software group hierarchy trying to get it out as a new product direction. Unfortunately it was too threatening to WebSphere (I even made a business plan for IBM!) and so it was to be killed and "knowledge transferred" to various work going on in IBM. In fact that was probably the right business decision for IBM!

That's when I decided to quit from IBM. Paul, myself and another person (who didn't end up joining WSO2 (yet)) had a secret meeting at his mother's place in London on December 21, 2004 to figure out plans to start a company to take the Colombo idea forward. We had expanded vision by then - our initial plan was for 3 products: an app server, an integration server and a process server.

Then of course 5 days after that the massive Boxing Day Tsunami struck Sri Lanka and Asia in general. 40,000 people died in Sri Lanka within a couple of hours. That's how Sahana was born .. now the world's leading disaster management system. I was very involved with that stuff for a few months so my company plans got delayed.

I finally quit IBM (with a lot of sad feelings) on April 15th, 2005. WSO2 was eventually formed in August 2005 and started on a journey which its still on ..

IBM went onto re-do their internal SOAP stuff taking various ideas from Colombo etc.. 6 months after I left however, we were able to convince IBM to kill that and join Apache Axis2. A bunch of us (6 people including Paul and myself IIRC) went to Austin and gave IBM a week of deep deep Axis2, Neethi etc. training to get them started. IBM is of course now a major contributor to Axis2 and ships it in WebSphere and a ton of IBM products.

So going back to SOAP for a second, I've had the luck and privilege to be deeply involved with 3 generations of SOAP implementations (IBM SOAP4J / Apache SOAP, Apache Axis and Apache Axis2). While each iteration has done major improvements, I still don't think we got it right! Axis is pretty much the front line of SOAP implementation architecture (yes I know there are many impls now and their differences) but there's room for a significant new rewrite :-). [I have recently started to supervise an MSc thesis which is going to do some PoC work in Erlang to do just that .. let's see where it goes!]

I would be remiss if I didn't specifically acknowledge the incredible role the Apache Software Foundation (of which I'm a proud member) has had in furthering the SOAP, WS-* and SOA agenda. If not for Apache SOAP there would not have been such rapid adoption of SOAP. Apache Axis made sure that the open source impls would continue to lead. Apache Axis2 made sure that that happened again. A ton of supporting projects (Sandesha, Kandula, Neethi, WSS4J, Rampart etc. etc.) all exist in Apache to give full coverage of WS-*. Now there's also Apache CXF which provides another (independent) implementation. Going beyond SOAP, Apache also hosts Woden, the only impl of J-WSDL and a ton of other projects like Tuscany, Ode, Synapse etc. which totally round out the SOA platform.

In short, if not for Apache's major support, Web services & SOA would not be where it is today. Thank you.

Update: Corrected typo in SOAP 0.9 date.

On innovation by Indian IT firms - comment to TechCrunch

2010-03-28T06:57:00.004+05:30

There was a TechCrunch post about workforce education where the author claimed that India does it better. I posted a long comment which is posted below. The main point is that India has a lot to learn from America on playing in the right part of the value chain. Training people to be better cogs in a wheel will get India nowhere (fast or slow).

You need to read the original post first.

Here's my comment:

=========

IMO there’s a huge fundamental flaw in your analysis. Firstly, I do agree that companies train less now and expect people to produce immediately. That’s simply reality globally – and the reason Indian companies train a lot up front is often because most new hires are unable to produce much (any?) without such training.

But that’s not the main issue I have with your analysis. You write:

“Additionally, the Indian R&D industry has been moving into the higher realms of innovation. In the aerospace industry, Indian companies are designing the interiors of luxury jets, in-flight entertainment systems, collision-control / navigation-control systems, fuel-inverting controls, and other key components of jetliners for American and European corporations.”

Well the R&D industry may be moving into “higher realms of innovation” but *whose* problems are they solving? Did they think of those problems and say they’re going to find a solution? As you yourself said they’re doing it “for American and European corporations.”

Therein lies the rub. All they’re offering is low cost paid labor. They are not scratching an itch they have. They are not innovating – they are simply delivering value to someone else in raw form so that they can refine it and make the real money.

That is what we in old colonial countries do so well – take our raw material and export it so that someone else can refine it and send it back as value added products for us (and the rest of the world to consume). I don’t need to tell you where the real value lies in that chain.

All you’ve described is that Indian now not only answer phones and transcribe documents (essentially low skill labor) but that they also solve hard analytical problems and do lab research for “American and European corporations”.

That is not innovation – that is just slave labor. Yes that’s right – to me that is simply selling bodies at whatever margin the Indian bosses can make something at.

Of the areas you mentioned, how many Indian brands exist in the world? How many products have Indians thought of and take it all the way to market in the west? Until India starts doing that, there’s nothing for America to learn from India. Right now, there’s TONS for India to learn from America.

India needs to stop selling its people and start finding problems and opportunities and start addressing them and competing globally with innovative products and services. That is the beauty of the US – that there are always new entrepreneurs who pop up with brilliant new ideas who go on to challenge & change the world. With every 100 of those there is one winner. If you don’t have hundreds popping up every year, the winners won’t be there. Of course there are a few exceptions in India but those numbers won’t be enough to really become a global player in the innovation driven IT world. (I know nothing about other industries so I am not going to comment.)

The real problem is that the Indian bosses are happy with their 30% margin. They’re happy because they can make billions more by hiring a few million more Indians to scale up. Ah but have you done a study of per-employee revenue generated by Indian BPO & services companies vs. major IT companies? My understanding is that its in the range of $30k/year. IBM does about $250k/year ($100B by 400k employees), Microsoft about $500k/year ($60b by about 120k employees) and Google about $1m/year ($20B by 20k employees). Do you think that doing R&D for “American & European corporations” will ever get Indian companies to the Google levels? Not a chance.

I’m a Sri Lankan who lived in the US for 16 years and returned home 8 years ago. In WSO2, the company I started with Paul Fremantle, we don’t treat our Sri Lankan team as “cheap labor”. They are part and parcel of the innovation engine we have created. In fact, they *are* the innovation engine we have created. We are now the only truly 100% open source alternative enterprise middleware platform to IBM, Oracle & Tibco. And a lot of the innovation came from young kids in Sri Lanka. We’re about to launch our entire middleware platform as a “Platform as a Service” offering – totally out innovating and going ahead of everyone.

Pretty much the only difference between us and a bunch of Indians in some Indian company is the mindset we bring to the table. We don’t view anything as “someone else will define the problem and we have to solve it”. Rather we look at it as “how do we do MUCH better than IBM/Oracle/Tibco and all the little guys out there”. We encourage and support people in thinking disruptively. We teach each other. We listen to the world. We reward risk taking. We give the freedom to work and think in a way that enables innovation.

With all due respect Vivek, you and other business school types are doing Indians a huge disservice when you tell them “bat on” with what’s going on. If India wakes up and starts challenging the world with innovation that originates from India then there will be something to talk about. Telling the world that India has cheap labor from low skills to PhDs is something I’d personally be ashamed to talk about rather than be proud of.

Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph.D.
Founder, Chairman & CEO; WSO2, Inc.
Founder, Director & Chief Scientist; Lanka Software Foundation
Member; Apache Software Foundation
Director; Sahana Software Foundation
Visiting Lecturer; University of Moratuwa

WSO2 launches Cloud Identity service

2010-02-17T21:08:00.001+05:30

Today we announced our second cloud service: Cloud Identity. See: http://wso2.com/cloud/services/identity and you can use it right now at http://identity.cloud.wso2.com/.

(We have a principle of not announcing vaporware!)

This is basically our WSO2 Identity Server product converted into a multi-tenant identity management system and hosted on Amazon EC2 for scalable and reliable deployment. Basically, within about 5 minutes you can register your domain, add your users and then have your own OpenID, Cardspace, SAML 2.0, WS-Trust STS for authentication and XACML and (very soon) OAuth for authorization. Translated to English, that means you can get a single place to manage your users and give them access to Drupal, Liferay, Google Apps and a whole lot more. We will soon be adding LDAP to this list as well, which means you can even tie Windows, Unix login to it as well as other services like SVN.

Nothing like giving it a try to see how it works!

[UPDATE] Here are some additional references for you to get started with:

Blog by Prabath Siriwardena (lead and god of all things security in WSO2) on getting started with this puppy: http://blog.facilelogin.com/2010/02/getting-started-with-wso2-cloud.html
A second blog by Prabath on how to hook it up to issue OpenIDs under your domain using WSO2 Cloud Identity: http://blog.facilelogin.com/2010/02/openids-under-your-domain-for-your.html
Article by Dimuthu Leelaratne (technical lead in our security team) on how to manage users in your organization using this: http://wso2.org/library/articles/idaas-managing-users
Article by Thilina Mahesh (software engineer in our security team) on how to hook up Google Apps to authenticate using this: http://wso2.org/library/articles/integrate-google-apps-wso2-cloud-identity

Happy identitying!

Future in Paradise – A Rant and A Rave

2010-02-13T18:27:00.001+05:30

Shahani (my wife) is blogging! She has started with a great piece on what’s going on in Sri Lanka.

The myth of rogue states

2010-02-07T10:56:00.001+05:30

The February 8th issue of the Newsweek (International) magazine has an absolutely great article titled “End of the Rogue”. The article is about how the concept of a “rogue state” (apparently created the cold war days) is no longer valid and how the US needs to get past it.

Not surprisingly many comments on the online edition don’t agree that the US approach needs to change. Living in Sri Lanka, however, and having observed the wrath of the US (and UK and EU) for the way the anti-LTTE war was conducted and ended, I can see what must be going on in “rogue” countries!

The most interesting quote I found in the article is this:

We don’t have the right to think other people should think like us.

If we all could live by that the entire world would be a better place!

WSO2 platform overview

2010-02-03T22:26:00.003+05:30

We recently posted a slide deck that gives an updated overview of the WSO2 platform. This covers both our downloadable products as well as our cloud offerings. Enjoy!

2010 Q1 WSO2 Technical Update

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Delivering a complete middleware platform under the Apache license

2010-01-02T11:32:00.004+05:30

Let me start by wishing everyone a wonderful 2010!

Right from the get-go, WSO2 was designed to be a company that built a complete middleware platform. We set out to target the big guys who have a complete story, except with two key fundamental differences: our technical approach and our business model.

Our technical approach is of course based on Web services and SOA. For the first time in the history of computing, Web services have offered a lingua franca for how systems interact with each other. There were of course many previous attempts, but one camp or the other of the technology industry didn't agree and so there was no "English" of the computer world. Web services has changed that with every major and minor vendor supporting interoperability via Web services (XML, HTTP, SOAP and the rest of WS-*).

SOA, despite the much ballyhooed story of its demise at the beginning of 2009, is not only alive and well, but is in fact kicking butt. SOA is fundamentally an approach for how to build large scale composite systems. As an approach, it mimics the real world's service-oriented economy. As such, SOA is a fundamental concept, not some vendor-driven theory. That said, SOA, like any other technology, has had to live through the Gartner Hype Curve. If at all instead of 2009 being the year SOA died, it became the year it came out of the trough and started climbing up towards the plateau of productivity.

Of course the fall into the trough was not without reason for SOA and Web services. Much of it was driven by middleware vendors not delivering anything new, anything valuable in the form of SOA middleware. Many of them simply took their existing middleware and rebranded it the shiny new SOA gimmick. Well that of course doesn't work and the cracks in the story will force you down to the trough .. and it did.

WSO2 is unique in having started from nothing and set off on a path to build a complete middleware platform with Web services and SOA in its heart. The result is simply orders of magnitude less complexity, much better performance and overall greater productivity and lower TCO. These are not random claims from me - these have all come from our users and customers.

We now call it Lean Enterprise Middleware. Try it and see - you'll be shocked at how lean it us, how productive it is and how much money you can save by replacing your legacy or pretend open source middleware stack with ours.

Now let's talk about the business model. Right from the beginning, we made a strong commitment to releasing all of our software under the Apache license and to not attempt any bait-n-switch type acts. Believe me, that took a lot of hard work to keep going .. investors for example have a major issue with the Apache license. Why? Well because you can take any of our software and do whatever you want with it and never ever pay us. We have no legal recourse to making you pay (as dual license business models do) nor any way to force you to pay for the good stuff (as many "commercial open source" companies do). Instead, we rely on delivering real, measurable value to our customers without forcing them to pay us. Our customers love us because they pay for the value we deliver to them, not because we are using the law to force them to pay for the software they use.

When I say you can do whatever, I mean whatever - recently one of our competitors sold a support contract for one of our own pieces of software! Yes, that is possible. In this case the people who will pay the eventual price is the customer who did the stupid thing of buying support from someone who has nothing to do with the software! Remember Oracle's Unbreakable Linux? Well that didn't break Redhat and neither will this act - it just shows how low some people will go to make a buck.

So today you can download an entire enterprise middleware platform from us without registering, without paying, without any risk of bait-n-switch for absolutely no cost. How can we afford to do that and become a successful business? We have many many customers who happily pay us to provide maintenance, provide help and in general to be their technology partner. So having thousands and thousands of free non-paying users is not a problem for us - that's free marketing and helps us save the world from the ugliness that is IBM, Oracle, etc. middleware.

WSO2 is delivering on the promise to build lean enterprise middleware and deliver 100% of it as open source under the Apache license. Oh yes, we also offer it as various cloud offerings - virtual machines, or online services.

We are the ONLY vendor offering a complete enterprise middleware platform 100% open source under the Apache license.

That was all wrapped up in 2009, a tremendous year for us. In an environment of economic uncertainty, not only did we meet our targets but we beat them. We have been doubling revenue each year and this year was no different. We are on a roll :-).

Looking towards 2010, we have more work to do to make our enterprise middleware platform simply untouchable by anyone else. We're already far ahead of our competitors with our WSO2 Carbon powered platform, but we have several things planned to further leave our competitors in the dust. As I wrote in an earlier blog, we practice open development - so if you want to be part of it come on over and join us on architecture@wso2.org!

Apache Asia Roadshow in Colombo, Sri Lanka - Dec 3-5th!

2009-11-18T22:48:00.004+05:30

Its baaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

Still not registered? What are you waiting for??

Do it now.

WSO2 cloud platform launched!

2009-11-18T22:44:00.002+05:30

After a lot of hard work by a lot of people, we finally launched our cloud platform on Monday!

Check out Paul's blog for some info and of course the Web site. I will blog more later!

Talk on "State of Services" at EDGE APAC in Canberra, AU

2009-11-12T10:43:00.004+05:30

I gave a keynote talk this morning at EDGE APAC in Canberra on the topic of SOA .. sort of a walk thru the history, what has been achieved and what the future is like. Yeah, all in 1hr.

State Of Services

View more presentations from Sanjiva Weerawarana.

Adam Fremantle (1934 to 2009)

2009-11-09T22:27:00.002+05:30

The entire WSO2 family grieves for Paul and his entire family at this sad time.

WSO2 practicing open development further

2009-11-09T21:54:00.002+05:30

From the time we started WSO2, Paul and I have both been completely certain that we always wanted to be a truly open company. That is, not a proprietary/closed company which simply releases software under an open source license, but rather a company which is more like an open source project in terms of how it does its technical work. The reason for this is because we believe that being open will bring more people to participate in our work which will eventually help us do better than our less-open competitors. Nope, we are not about to share how we do are doing business :-).

That of course comes from our Apache legacy of having started so many different projects and watching many of them succeed beyond our wildest dreams. Apache SOAP, Apache Axis, Apache Axis2, Apache Synapse, Apache WSIF are some of the examples.

We of course started the WSO2 Oxygen Tank (http://wso2.org/) for exactly that purpose. ALL of our code is there and we had a ton of different mailing lists for all the different projects.

That’s where the problems first started – by having separate mailing lists for each project/product, it became cumbersome for us to keep track of all the lists and to participate properly in all of them. Also, as we moved towards unifying our products around a single framework (as we’ve now done with WSO2 Carbon), the separate lists meant that every conversation had to be cc’ed to multiple lists – very annoying when you’re on the receiving end via multiple lists.

The other part of the problem was that we also had to have some internal communication mechanism to discuss customer issues. So we set up an internal list called architecture@ which was meant to be ONLY for customer issues – stuff that we couldn’t discuss publicly because they involved specific customer issues. However, due to a variety of reasons, over time the architecture@ list became the place where we ended up discussing many of the core issues that we went through when making the transition to Carbon.

Not any more!

We have recently done a MAJOR re-org of all the @wso2.org lists and also done a major cleanup of all internal lists. Now on wso2.org we have:

3 –dev lists: carbon-dev, wsf-dev and commons-dev. Carbon-dev is for all discussion related to all Carbon core stuff and every product built with it (ESB, WSAS, BAM etc.). WSF-dev is for discussion related to Web service frameworks – the low level stuff that provides WS-* functionality for Carbon. Commons-dev is to discuss all “other” projects in OxygenTank; stuff that’s common to various bits but not strictly a Carbon product or a WSF product.
Corresponding –issues and –svn lists: to separate user discussions, JIRA notifications and SVN notifications, respectively.
Per product –user lists and of course forums.
New public architecture@wso2.org list which is used for all architecture discussions. If you’re more of a high level person then that’s the most interesting list to participate in to understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, how we’re doing it and of course to be part of the process of deciding what/when/how we do it. Competitors are welcome, especially those that want to de-cloak ;-).

Internally, the architecture@ list is gone for good! Instead, we now have a support-dev list to discuss customer issues and ONLY customer issues. In addition, we have a strategy@ list to discuss how we plan to take over the world (;-)) and a few other lists which will become apparent soon! However, if the discussion is related to any architectural matters related to any of our products, it WILL happen on architecture@.

Want to be part of our [extended] family? Come join us on architecture@wso2.org. See: http://wso2.org/mail.

America takes the wrong side in anti-terror fight

2009-11-07T22:53:00.001+05:30

Nope, not my title :-). Its an editorial by The Washington Times on October 28th.

Really worth reading – it talks about how stupid the US is being by challenging Sri Lanka with a war crimes charge about how the LTTE war was won.

Sri Lanka’s path to peace

2009-10-24T18:06:00.002+05:30

This is a great piece on Britain’s Guardian on what has happened in Sri Lanka and what is good for us going forward. In particular, the author touches on the misguided plan by the EU to cut off GSP+ trade concessions for Sri Lanka as a punishment for human rights violations.

One of these days I’ll blog about that topic … I need to calm down before I can write down what I really want to say about what I think of the world’s double standards :-).