This was the first time I went to a WSO2 Conference and this time it was held was Londen!
It was a three days conference with 1 day pre-conference from 7th of June until the 9th of June. The conference is for partners and users of the platform. The second day of the conference was ended with a party.

The main themes of this event were (not surprisingly):

• Mobility
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• API Management
• Analytics
• Security

Pre-conference

The pre-conference is a day in which products are shown in more detail. The sessions are 3 ½ hours long and this way your get much more insight into the product. The rest of the conference days sessions are much shorter (25 minutes).

Hamming Platform

There was the announcement of the successor of the Carbon 5 platform code name Hamming Platform.

This platform will be faster and more suitable for container deployments. The Synapse framework will be raplaced by decoupled pluggable engines and will start within 2 secs. It contains Netty application framework for fast processing of messages. This gateway is no longer a separate product but part of the wso2 framework for many products. The use of Apache Synapse is removed. This way WSO2 offers a framework ready for platform 3.1. I am very curious about the platform!

API Manager

The API management product 2.0 was announced and can be tried by partners. The GA version will be released soon this year. The most remarkable new features include:

• Developer composition of APIs
  This lets developers compose their own APIs from available other APIs. This way the API can be altered for specific needs. For example paginating and filtering.
• More analytics data about APIs out-of-the-box
  Examples of analytics is latency (seperated by the api gateway call and api backend call)
• Rate limiting
• Real time analysis
  You can configure alerts for a couple of types (i.e. abnormal response time, abnormal api usage)
• Dynamic throttling handling
• Log Analyzer
  Overview of api data
• Revised look-and-feel of API Publisher, Store and Admin Dashboard
• API Store enhancements
  – Notify subscribers when new API versions are published
  – Generate client side SDKs for API

I am happy about the new integrated out-of-the-box analytics because this increase the value of the produkt. Also the generation of SDK code and notifications when new API versions are published can be very valuable for customers. Furthermore the developer composition feature gives the developer the opportunity to define compositions which will give more flexibility and possibilities to the API usage. Of course this will also be dependant on the possible backend calls possible!

ESB 5.0.0

The new version of ESB 5.0.0 was also announced and the GA version will probably released by the end of july 2016. The new features that are available within this version are:

• JMS 2.0 support
• ESB tooling plugin which lets you develop components with a simplified graphical editor
• Debugging mediation
• More analytics out-of-the-box. Alerts can be configured for
  – time spent on mediator
  – time to process message
  – fault count on single message flow
  – message payload recorded
• Data Mapper
  Even though the functionality is still limited, the data mapper can be used to transform data. It is a fully fledged mediator which generates a separate eclipse project.
• WebSocket support

The debugging feature is a welcome added feature because a lot of customers were missing it. Also the data mapper is needed, although not very rich on functionality yet. The analytics right out-of-the-box is a good and wanted addition to the product.

Data Services Server

The Data Services Server will be followed by the Data Integration Server. A couple of features:

• Data access/transformation/orchestration in DIS
  This means that no external call for data transformation is needed anymore and therefore performance will increase. Furthermore a common core integration language will be used for configuring data flows

• OData (V4) support
• The data integration server targets: Data Services, Data warehousing, Mater Data Management

Message Broker

The roadmap for message broker:

• Support of AMQP 1.0 and JMS 2.0
• Analytics
• Move to Carbon 5 platform
• Improved GUI
• MQTT + Websockets

Identity Server

The Identity Server will help in

• Managing identities and roles (governance)
• Idendity federation (supporting multiple federation protocols, i.e. OpenID, SAML2, CAS)
• Serving as an identity BUS (identity bridging, claim transformation, role transformation)
• Just-in-time (JIT) provisioning
• Delegated authorization
• Trusted subsystems

Roadmap

The roadmap of the WSO2 platform and products:

• Better orchestration capabilities through sequence diagrams (UML like). This integration language will be re-used in several products like ESB, API Manager and Data integration server
• Better error handling
• Message tracing
• Visual modeling
• Better performance
• Integration service as a microservice (lightweight and deployed as a container)
• Hybrid Integration Platform:
  On-premise: complex and/or mission critical iPaas: with prebuild integration solutions iSaas: simple integration, social integration

Cloud solutions

WSO2 supports the following cloud solutions:

• Public: managing apps, API, integration, analytics, identity and devices
• Hosted and managed: US East, US West, EU, Asia Pacific, South America
• Running on AWS
• Paas
  All products are supported as a PaaS running on kubernetes

Internet Of Things Server

WSO2 has a beta version of the IoT Server and the GA version 1.0.0 will be available mid july 2016. This server is a distributed set of integrated wso2 components.

The supported device types

• Raspberry Pi
• Arduino Uno
• IRIS+ Drone
• LED Display
• Android sensors

Device types can be added to the centralized device management platform.

The currently supported transports

• MQTT
• XMPP
• HTTP
• WIP ( CoAP, OCP (for PLCs))

Authentication mechanisms for devices supported:

• OAuth 2.0
• SCEP (Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol)

Conclusion

Although the event was not visited by a lot of people (around 300+), it was worthwhile. For me the following facts were interested:

• WSO2 continues to develop its platform to be innovative and “cool”
• Focus on containerization and performance
• Focus on ease of use by integrating more monitoring and analytics into the products out-of-the-box
• Better debugging possibilities within ESB
• Focus on IoT
• Better configuring and modeling features added

Hope to be back next year !