Uthaiyashankar's Blog

Why you should care about WSO2 Stratos

2010-06-03T04:14:00.000-07:00

Paul Fremantle, CTO of WSO2, talks about how WSO2 Stratos can help you to achieve your business goals with minimum cost. Watch the clip, and register to try out WSO2 Stratos!

Building Axis2/C with Apache Httpd

2010-03-17T21:42:00.000-07:00

Building Axis2/C with source release of Apache httpd
(1) Download httpd source from Apache httpd download page and unzip it
(2) Configure with --prefix option and --with-included-apr option, then make it.

./configure --prefix=/home/shankar/software/apache2/ --with-included-apr; make; make install;

(3) Download Axis2/C source from Axis2/C download page and unzip it
(4) Configure with --prefix option and --with-apache2 option. After configuring, make it.

./configure --prefix=/home/shankar/software/axis2/ --with-apache2=/home/shankar/software/apache2/include; make; make install;

(5) Copy /home/shankar/software/axis2/lib/libmod_axis2.so to /home/shankar/software/apache2/modules

cp /home/shankar/software/axis2/lib/libmod_axis2.so /home/shankar/software/apache2/modules

(6) Edit /home/shankar/software/apache2/conf/httpd.conf and add following

LoadModule axis2_module /home/shankar/software/apache2/modules/libmod_axis2.so
Axis2RepoPath /home/shankar/software/axis2/
Axis2LogFile /tmp/axis2.log
Axis2LogLevel info
Axis2MaxLogFileSize 10
Axis2GlobalPoolSize 10
<location axis2="">
    SetHandler axis2_module
</location>

(7)If you are running httpd as a normal user, not as a root, have to modify "user" and "group" settings in httpd.conf
(8) Access the services listing page and verify whether installation is OK.

http://localhost:8080/axis2/services

Building Axis2/C with binary release of Apache httpd
(1) Install following packages

httpd
httpd-devel
apr
apr-devel

(2) Configure Axis2/C using following options

./configure --prefix=/home/shankar/software/axis2/ --with-apache2 --with-apr

(3) Other steps are similar to the way mentioned above.

Administration console for Axis2/C WSF/C and WSF/C++

2010-03-10T20:32:00.000-08:00

Administration console for Axis2/C, WSF/C and WSF/C++ was released today. Upto now, if you want to configure the services for Axis2/C etc., you have to do using command line. Administration console initiative will allow you to do that using a convenient frontend. You can configure the security policy of services, manage your keystores, get statistics of the services using the console. Still the console is in its infant phase, but will have a huge set of features in near future, including hot deployment of services and graceful restart of backend. You can read the release note from C web services blog and download the admin console from WSF/C project page.

This administration console is based on WSO2 Carbon. From WSO2 Carbon's point of view, this is going to be a success story. This will be a proof of concept, that carbon console can talk to any backend. Backend doesn't need to be written using Carbon or Java, but it can be written in C, C++ or .NET. This success story will help more people to get advantage by using WSO2 Carbon.

Unix Haters Handbook

2010-03-03T09:38:00.000-08:00

I was reading Unix Haters Handbook. Following is an excerpt from the book:

Date: Sun, 13 May 90 16:06 EDT
From: John R. Dunning
To: jnc@allspice.lcs.mit.edu, UNIX-HATERS
Subject: Unix: the last word in incompatibility.
Date: Tue, 8 May 90 14:57:43 EDT
From: Noel Chiappa
[...]
I think Unix and snowflakes are the only two classes of objects
in the universe in which no two instances ever match exactly.
I think that’s right, and it reminded me of another story.
Some years ago, when I was being a consultant for a living, I had a
job at a software outfit that was building a large graphical user-inter-
face sort of application. They were using some kind of Unix on a
PDP-11 for development and planning to sell it with a board to
OEMs. I had the job of evaluating various Unix variants, running on
various multibus-like hardware, to see what would best meet their
needs.
The evaluation process consisted largely of trying to get their test
program, which was an early prototype of the product, to compile
and run on the various *nixes. Piece of cake, sez I. But oops, one
vendor changed all the argument order around on this class of system
functions. And gee, look at that: A bug in the Xenix compiler pre-
vents you from using byte-sized frobs here; you have to fake it out
with structs and unions and things. Well, what do you know, Venix’s
pseudo real-time facilities don’t work at all; you have to roll your
own. Ad nauseam.
I don’t remember the details of which variants had which problems,
but the result was that no two of the five that I tried were compatible
for anything more than trivial programs! I was shocked. I was
appalled. I was impressed that a family of operating systems that
claimed to be compatible would exhibit this class of lossage. But the
thing that really got me was that none of this was surprising to the
other *nix hackers there! Their attitude was something to the effect
of “Well, life’s like that, a few #ifdefs here, a few fake library inter-
face functions there, what’s the big deal?”
I don’t know if there’s a moral to this story, other than one should
never trust anything related to Unix to be compatible with any other
thing related to Unix. And oh yeah, I heard some time later that the
software outfit in question ran two years over their original schedule,
finally threw Unix out completely, and deployed on MS-DOS
machines. The claim was that doing so was the only thing that let
them get the stuff out the door at all!

Working with Axis2/C, I have same experience in *nix environments. Even different flavors of Linux have different ways of doing things. Who said Linux is a friendly operating system? Only people who haven't used Windows!!!

Death of the black box EULA (From ZDNet)

2009-11-29T19:20:00.000-08:00

Nice blog about EULA.

WSO2 WSF/C++ 2.1.0 Released

2009-10-16T21:55:00.000-07:00

WSO2 Web Services Framework for C++ (WSO2 WSF/C++) 2.1.0 Released

=================================================================

WSO2 WSF/C++ team is pleased to announce the release of WSO2 WSF/C++ 2.1.0.

You can download this release from: http://wso2.org/downloads/wsf/cpp

WSO2 Web Services Framework for C++ (WSO2 WSF/C++) is a standards compliant, enterprise

grade, open source, C++ library for providing and consuming Web services in C++, based on the popular,

WSO2 WSF/C library.

Project home page:

http://wso2.org/projects/wsf/cpp

-------------

Key Features

=============

1. Client API to consume Web services

* ServiceClient class with one-way and two-way service invocation support

for SOAP 1.1, and SOAP 1.2.

* Options class to facilitate configuring the client for both SOAP and REST options.

2. Service API to provide Web Services

* ServiceSkeleton class to extend from to implement services.

2. Attachments with MTOM

* Binary optimized

* Non-optimized (Base64 binary)

* Attachment Caching Support

3. WS-Addressing

* Version 1.0

* Submission

4. WSPolicy

5. WS-Security

* Username Token

* Timestamp Token

* Signing

* Encryption

* WS-SecurityPolicy based configuration

* Reply detection

* WS-Trust

* WS-Secure Conversation

6. Code generation Tool

* By providing a wsdl and options, generate client stubs and service skeletons

in C++ using the code generation tool.

* A Code generation Eclipse plugin is also available with this release. The code generation tool

has been integrated into an eclipse plugin wizard which allows a user to conveniently

utilise the code generation tool while working within eclipse.

7. SSL enabled transport layer

8. WS-Reliable Messaging

9. Has all the capabilities available from WSF/C library.

--------------------------------

Major Changes Since Last Release

================================

1. Eclipse plugin for code generation tool added.

2. Visual Studio project file generation is added to the code generation tool.

3. Documentation Improved.

4. Many bugs fixed in the code generation tool.

5. Many memory leak fixes.

6. More samples have been added.

7. The Service API has been enhanced to allow users to extend from the generated skeleton classes.

-------------------

Known Issues

-------------------

There could be memory leaks in some scenarios.

-------------------

Reporting Problems

===================

Issues can be reported using the public JIRA available at:

https://wso2.org/jira/browse/WSFCPP

-----------

===========

Mailing Lists

-------------

Please subscribe to our user or developer mailing lists. For details on how

to subscribe please visit: http://wso2.org/mail

Discussion Forums

-----------------

Questions could be raised using the WSF/C++ forum.

http://wso2.org/forum/352

Training

========

WSO2 Inc. offers a variety of professional Training Programs which includes training on WSF/C++.

For additional information please refer to http://wso2.com/training/

Support

========

WSO2 Inc. offers a variety of development and production support programs, ranging from Web-based

support up through normal business hours, to premium 24x7 phone support.

For additional support information please refer to http://wso2.com/services/support/

We welcome your early feedback on this implementation.

Thank you for your interest in WSO2 WSF/C++.

-- WSO2 WSF/C++ Team --

Improving performance of Guththila

2009-09-29T20:36:00.000-07:00

I am doing some improvements to Guththila XML parser these days. Guththila XML parser is the default parser used by Axis2/C. The modifications to the code was very simple, but gave a huge improvement. We got about 3-4 times improvement during this exercise. Compare the performance of revision 812074 Vs 817160 for message size of 64kbytes.

I was using callgrind to profile Axis2/C. Improvements were mainly for big message processing. I used 1M messages to find the bottlenecks.

Initially, guththila was taking 674 M clock cycles to process 3 messages
guththila_next_char method is using many pointer references. Removing some of them by keeping variables resulted in guththila taking only 634 M clock cycles
guththila next char was returning a character by comparing c>=0?c;-1. just returning c without the comparison resulted in 591M clock cycles
guththila_next_char method was called for each character of the payload. However, only first five lines of the code was executed around 99% of the time. For big messages, method calling overhead was very high. (In our case, it was called 10000000 times). Moving first five lines into a macro and calling the method if the macro cannot satisfy (which is less thank 1% of the time) resulted in 389M clock cycles
GUTHTHILA_IS_SPACE macro was checking (c == 0x20 || c == 0xD || c == 0xA || c == 0x9) and returning the result. But for majority of the cases, a character is not a space and above operation needed 4 comparisons to get a result. Replacing it with ((c < 0x21) && (c == 0x20 || c == 0xD || c == 0xA || c == 0x9)) made only one comparison for most of the cases, resulting in 289M clock cycles.
To find next occurrence of a character, guththila_next was going character by character until we find a match. Replacing it with memchr method resulted in 59M clock cycles.

Even though the modifications are very simple, the CPU cycle needed to process three 1M messages were brought down from 674M cycles to just 59M cycles.

Weird Licenses

2009-09-28T19:50:00.000-07:00

I am a great fan of WordWeb and using it for sometime. Their license is very interesting and fun!!!. I got following question to continue using free version.

Another interesting licence I came across is, WTFPL. I always wonder how they are thinking and coming up with these kind of licences!!! :D

Axis2/C Dual Channel Problem

2009-09-28T19:29:00.000-07:00

We got some dual channel problems in Axis2/C yesterday. First problem is, it crashes time to time. Second problem is we could not be able to get RelatesTo, MessageID, etc. from the resulting message context.

The crash is due to a scenario as follows; create a service client, consume a service using dual channel, then free service client. Note that the application is still running. When deleting the service client, it frees all of the allocated structures, but not the thread created by listener manager to listen for the dual channel case. That thread is still running and using some of the deleted structures and resulting a crash. The fix is, in axis2_svc_client_finalize_invoke, we have to get the thread ID and terminate that thread. This will stop the listener manager thread. However, the worker thread created by listener manager thread might be still running. So before deleting service client, we should "sleep" for a while, giving enough CPU to worker thread to exit. Then call axis2_svc_client_free.

Reason for second problem is, in the dual channel case, a new message context was created in the in-path. It is not populated with any of the details normally available in single channel case. However, when listener manager receives the reply, it creates a message context and populates all those details and it is not used in in-path. Using that message context instead of creating a new one solved the issue.

Apache Axis2/C 1.6.0 released

2009-04-21T22:00:00.001-07:00

Apache Axis2/C 1.6.0 released today. It contains many new features. The release note is given below;

We are pleased to announce the release of Apache Axis2/C version 1.6.0.
You can download this release from
http://ws.apache.org/axis2/c/download.cgi

Key Features
============

1. Support for one-way messaging (In-Only) and
request response messaging (In-Out)
2. Client APIs : Easy to use service client API and
more advanced operation client API
3. Transports supported : HTTP
* Inbuilt HTTP server called simple axis server
* Apache2 httpd module called mod_axis2 for server side
* IIS module for server side. Supports IIS 5.1, 6 and 7.
* Client transport with ability to enable SSL support
* Basic HTTP Authentication
* Digest HTTP Authentication
* libcurl based client transport
* CGI interface
4. Transports supported : HTTPS
* HTTPS Transport implementation using OpenSSL
5. Transports supported : TCP
* for both client and server side
6. Transports supported : AMQP
* AMQP Transport implementation using Apache Qpid
* Available only in Linux platforms.
* At an experimental stage. Please refer the INSTALL file to
build this.
7. Transport proxy support (HTTP)
* Proxy Authentication (Basic/Digest)
8. Module architecture, mechanism to extend the SOAP processing
model.
9. WS-Addressing support, both the submission (2004/08) and
final (2005/08) versions, implemented as a module.
10. MTOM/XOP support.
11. AXIOM, an XML object model optimized for SOAP 1.1/1.2 messages;
This has complete XML infoset support.
12. XPath support for Axiom XML Object model
13. XML parser abstraction
* Libxml2 wrapper
* Guththila pull parser support
14. Both directory based and archive based deployment models for
deploying services and modules
15. Description hierarchy providing access to static data of Axis2/C
runtime (configuration, service groups, services, operations and
messages)
16. Context hierarchy providing access to dynamic
Axis2/C runtime information (corresponding contexts to map to
each level of description hierarchy)
17. Message receiver abstraction
* Inbuilt raw XML message receiver
18. Code generation tool for stub and skeleton generation for a given
WSDL (based on Java tool)
* Axis Data Binding (ADB) support
19. REST support (more POX like) using HTTP POST, GET, HEAD, PUT and
DELETE
* Support for RESTful Services
20. Comprehensive documentation
* Axis2/C Manual
21. WS-Policy implementation called Neethi/C, with WS-SecurityPolicy
extension

Major Changes Since Last Release
================================

1. XPath support for Axiom XML object model
2. CGI support
3. Improvements to MTOM to send, receive very large attachments
4. Improvements to AMQP transport
5. Improvements to WSDL2C codegen tool
6. Many bug fixes.
7. Memory leak fixes

We welcome your early feedback on this implementation.

Thanks for your interest in Axis2/C !!!

-- Apache Axis2/C Team --

Rampart/C: Super Fast WS-Security Processor

2009-02-17T20:21:00.000-08:00

I am planning to improve the performance of Rampart/C. To start with, I wanted to compare the performance with Rampart/Java to get an idea. I used the following policy to compare:


<wsp:Policy xmlns:wsp="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/09/policy">
  <wsp:ExactlyOne>
    <wsp:All>
      <sp:AsymmetricBinding xmlns:sp="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/07/securitypolicy">
        <wsp:Policy>
          <sp:InitiatorToken>
            <wsp:Policy>
              <sp:X509Token sp:IncludeToken="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/07/securitypolicy/IncludeToken/AlwaysToRecipient">
                <wsp:Policy>
                  <sp:RequireThumbprintReference/>
                  <sp:WssX509V3Token10/>
                </wsp:Policy>
              </sp:X509Token>
            </wsp:Policy>
          </sp:InitiatorToken>
          <sp:RecipientToken>
            <wsp:Policy>
              <sp:X509Token sp:IncludeToken="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/07/securitypolicy/IncludeToken/Never">
                <wsp:Policy>
                  <sp:RequireThumbprintReference/>
                  <sp:WssX509V3Token10/>
                </wsp:Policy>
              </sp:X509Token>
            </wsp:Policy>
          </sp:RecipientToken>
          <sp:AlgorithmSuite>
            <wsp:Policy>
              <sp:Basic256/>
            </wsp:Policy>
          </sp:AlgorithmSuite>
          <sp:Layout>
            <wsp:Policy>
              <sp:Strict/>
            </wsp:Policy>
          </sp:Layout>
          <sp:OnlySignEntireHeadersAndBody/>
        </wsp:Policy>
      </sp:AsymmetricBinding>
      <sp:Wss11 xmlns:sp="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/07/securitypolicy">
        <sp:Policy>
          <sp:MustSupportRefKeyIdentifier/>
          <sp:MustSupportRefIssuerSerial/>
          <sp:MustSupportRefThumbprint/>
          <sp:RequireSignatureConfirmation/>
        </sp:Policy>
      </sp:Wss11>
      <sp:Wss10 xmlns:sp="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/07/securitypolicy">
        <sp:Policy>
          <sp:MustSupportRefKeyIdentifier/>
          <sp:MustSupportRefIssuerSerial/>
        </sp:Policy>
      </sp:Wss10>
      <sp:SignedParts xmlns:sp="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/07/securitypolicy">
        <sp:Body/>
      </sp:SignedParts>
      <sp:EncryptedParts xmlns:sp="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/07/securitypolicy">
        <sp:Body/>
      </sp:EncryptedParts>
    </wsp:All>
  </wsp:ExactlyOne>
</wsp:Policy>

The payload used was:


<greetRequest xmlns="http://www.wso2.org/types">
    <name>test me</name>
</greetRequest>

I captured the encrypted and signed payload using tcpmon and replayed it using ab. 1000 requests were sent in 10 concurrency level. ab command used was:


"C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin\ab" -p samples/a.txt -n 1000 -c 10 -T "application/soap+xml;charset=UTF-8" http://localhost:8080/axis2/services/sec_echo

The results were promising. Rampart/C can do 140 messages per second and Rampart/Java can only do 10 messages per second. Rampart/C is 14 times faster than Rampart/Java!!!

I used D820 Dell Latitude machine with 2GB memory to test it.

Consuming web services using WSO2 WSF/PHP

2008-10-29T19:52:00.000-07:00

Dimuthu has created a screen cast to explain how easy it is to consume a web services using WSO2 WSF/PHP. He has selected NOAA's National Weather Service as the test service and used the weather forecasting functionality in his demonstration. You can find more details from Dimuthu's blog.

Compiling Rampart/C with openssl 0.9.8i

2008-10-29T00:51:00.000-07:00

I am upgrading my httpd and openssl to httpd 2.2.10 and openssl 0.9.8i. After upgrading to new openssl, I got an error while compiling Rampart/C. After struggling to find the issue, I discovered that it actually a problem in openssl. And then I realised, I have already found this problem once upon a time, and helped a user. Too bad, my poor memory :).

So, how to solve the issue???

Add X509_EXTENSIONS to the value that are already being undefined for Windows in x509.h:

#ifdef OPENSSL_SYS_WIN32
/* Under Win32 these are defined in wincrypt.h */
#undef X509_NAME
#undef X509_CERT_PAIR
#undef X509_EXTENSIONS
#endif

RESTful PHP Web Services by Samisa Abeysinghe

2008-10-21T21:55:00.000-07:00

Samisa Abeysinghe has published a book titled "RESTful PHP Web Services".

This book will tell you...

Basic concepts of REST architecture
Consuming public REST-style services from your PHP applications
Consuming RESTful web services, such as those from leading APIs such as Flickr, and Yahoo Web Search
Making your own PHP applications accessible to other applications through a RESTful API
REST support in the popular Zend framework
Debugging RESTful services and clients
A case study of designing a RESTful PHP service from the ground up, and designing clients to consume the service

Eagerly waiting to own a copy of the book.

WSF/PHP and WSF/Python Alphas released

2008-07-25T20:06:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned earlier, we at WSO2 are working on WSF/PHP 2.0.0 and WSF/Python 1.0.0. As an initial step, Alpha releases were released. You can get WSF/PHP Alpha from here and WSF/Python Alpha from here.

WSF/Python Alpha is only supported in Linux. We are working on to give support in Windows as well. It has support for client side only. Server side support will be added soon.

WSF/PHP 2.0.0 is going to have lots of new features; WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation, Keystore Management, Replay detection and many more.

Any comments on Alpha releases are highly appreciated. You can give comments and suggestions in WSF/PHP Jira and WSF/Python Jira

WSF/RUBY 1.1.0 Released

2008-07-23T20:14:00.001-07:00

WSO2 WSF/RUBY 1.1.0 is released today (23 July 2008).

WSF/Ruby is the Ruby language extension to WSO2 WSF/C. This enables you to consume/provide Web Services both with REST and with the power of WS-* stack including WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Security, WS-Addressing and MTOM Attachments.

For more information, please visit our project home page

You can download this release from: http://wso2.org/downloads/wsf/ruby

Next in line to be released are WSF/Python (our new member) and WSF/PHP 2.0.0.

Web Service Interoperability - WSO2 Stock Trader

2008-07-23T08:09:00.000-07:00

We demonstrated interoperability between WSF/PHP, JAVA and .NET web services in last Microsoft Teched. To improve the story, we have implemented stock trader application in WSF/Ruby, WSF/Perl, WSF/Python and WSF/Spring as well. This will be demonstrated in OSCON tomorrow. New members for WSO2 Stock Trader includes

Ruby Trader Client
Ruby Order Processor Service
Python Trader Client
Perl Trader Client
Spring Business Service
Spring Order Processor Service

In addition to those, we implemented a configuration service, using which we can easily change the service layers. The demonstration is going to be really cool. Eagerly waiting to hear the news from Samisa...

Security in open source

2008-07-21T20:00:00.000-07:00

Most of the open source projects don't take security seriously. We have to admit the truth. Why? One reason is they prefer performance than security

Most of the hackers are not interested in breaking open source projects. Simple example is, there are not many virus for linux, not because linux is perfect, but it is open source. There is no thrill to break something that is already open :). Many hackers are breaking the system for adventure. Not to take something from the system.

Am I saying security is not needed for open source software? Definitely not. I am working on security module for Axis2/C, which is Rampart/C. I know the values of security. So, how open source projects should do security?

One comment from Dana Blankenhorn in his blog

“If there’s an application hack at Microsoft you would know who to go to. But what about open source? The answer isn’t always clear,” director of product marketing Rob Rachwald told ZDNet.

Most of the open source projects are having issue reporting systems but we can't use that system to report security issues. If a company is using an open source software and they are having a security issue, the moment they report the issue in public issue reporting system, their system will be hacked. Hence, there has to be a private place where users can report the issues. One possibility is every open source projects should have a mailing address dedicated for security issues. People encounter issues can send mail to that address. For example, if there is a security hole in Project ABC provided by XYZ.com, there has to be a mailing address security@XYZ.com where security issues should be reported. If security@domain convention is followed, then most of the issues will be reported and will be solved.

One advantage of open source projects is, they will be verified by several different minds. Possibility of finding any bugs or security issues are very high. If those can be reported confidentially, then most of the issues can be solved.

Setting 100 character guide in visual studio

2008-05-28T22:12:00.001-07:00

I was searching a way to set a vertical line guide after 100 characters in visual studio. This functionality is given in most of the source editors. I could not find a direct way to do it in visual studio 2005. Finally Ruwan Janapriya gave a "hack" way. You can set registry setting in [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor] and set a string value of "Guides"="RGB(0,0,0) 100", then it will show a vertical line after 100 characters with black colour.

Ethical use of office computers

2008-04-03T20:55:00.000-07:00

This was an MBA research done by Tharindu Liyanagunawardena and Samarasinghe K.

This mentions some of the common mistakes we do without knowing the outcomes. For example, take forwarding fun mails. It might be fun for us, but possibly management might have to pay penalty for that. Next time before hitting forward, we should think about that.

A good article to increase awareness of acceptable IT policy.

A "Must Read" article

2007-10-14T20:35:00.000-07:00

a nice article about open source development, especially in UI design.
http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/10/05/make_oss_humane/

Are we the aliens???

2007-10-10T20:52:00.000-07:00

Recently I watched a program (space man) in National Geographic Channel. Since the earth is reaching its final days, scientists are searching for a planet similar to earth. Then they are sending some people to that planet. The journey would take hundreds of years. Then they will settle there. When viewing this I remembered "Planet of the Apes". This film is about time travelling. Suppose, if our future generation is scientifically advanced and can do time travelling, the aliens visiting our planet now can be our future generation went to the other planet to servive, comming to see their old planet :-). (Nice topic to take a film).

Very nice facebook

2007-09-24T08:35:00.000-07:00

Recently I have added some friends to my facebook. It is really nice to see and search some old friends with whome the contacts were lost. I really appreciate the creative minds behind the facebook.