I'll be running an on-line training which teaches you how to create Mashups on the WSO2 Mashup Server next week.
In addition to the people who actually want to learn specifically about creating Mashups and personalizing or composing web services, this would also be a good starting point for all those people out there who want to get started on web services, but don't want to go though the hassle of learning Java or C# and the internals of a typical application server.
If you've already downloaded and played around with our server you know by now that it's a simple, no-nonsense platform for creating your mashups. Chances are you'd have had your 'HelloWorld' mashup running 10-15 minutes after downloading the installer or zip file. This training will show you how to use the features we've built into it and really harness the power of the server.
Anyone with some programming experience and a basic knowledge of JavaScript could quite easily be mashing up information from a web service, static HTML page and an RSS feed, to create a personalized service with a HTML UI and EMail/IM alerts at the end of the 3 hour session.
Sounds interesting? Take a look at the course details and decide.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Release
We went on a trip to Eheliyagoda between Christmas and the new year, which I believe was the perfect end to 2007. We got back home after 3 days of good food and drink and great company (Sharm's schoolmates with their families) on 31st evening, so when the new year dawned I was relaxing at home, sober, alternating between watching episodes of 'Enterprise' and reading 'Darwin's Radio'!
The year started out pretty busy, getting our Mashup Server ready for release - something that's always been on the horizon since I joined WSO2, now within reach. The release date was decided pretty early so there was an immovable point in time, which we had to meet.
Of course, true to Murphy's law, trust something I had written to completely blow up the Friday before release Monday! The service monitor, an innocent little system tray icon which displays server status, causes service deployment to fail! Turns out the act of observing server status using a certain MBean actually DOES affect the status of the server and very badly at that. I would've called it a 'heisenberg uncertainty bug' if I had been thinking clearly about anything besides the bug itself at the time, and maybe if I had watched the particular episode of 'Numb3rs' that I did last night.
I suppose the astrologers out there would now be saying 'so you finally have evidence that seemingly unconnected things can affect each other, so why do you have trouble believing that a random scattering of stars, light years away from us, that appear to be in a certain pattern when viewed from a certain angle, affects how your day is going to turn out'. Well, this is different and I have more faith in my belief that watching the progress bar actually can affect the speed of the download; something a friend showed me could be explained by the above mentioned principle!
Anyway, the unlikely solution turned out to be the right one, the fix was checked in on Sunday evening and Monday morning dawned nice and bright. Unfortunately nightfall on the 28th brought with it another surprise; the home page of our web application was making the browser crash - not good! This started happening at 7:00 PM on release eve, long after we had stopped doing anything significant enough to cause this sort of catastrophic failure! Turned out to have a perfectly rational explanation and a trivial solution with no code changes, so we finally managed to put the artifacts up and sent the release announcements!
The next night I took Sharm and the Kids out to our favourite Japanese restaurant; Sharm's now a total sushi addict herself and the kids love the fried-chicken-like meal they serve. All release related transgressions compensated for in full!
After this, while we were quietly preparing the data sheets, samples and training material and answering questions on forums, a security vulnerability was just waiting to be exploited on the community site running our server! Discovery, a quick release with the security fix and one more to fix the feature that we broke with the aforementioned fix and we're already at 1.0.2 with a few lessons learned!
Oh yes, Samadhi started playschool on the 7th, something that probably didn't feel very important to her at the time, but the first step in what I hope will be a long journey that will be it's own reward!
The year started out pretty busy, getting our Mashup Server ready for release - something that's always been on the horizon since I joined WSO2, now within reach. The release date was decided pretty early so there was an immovable point in time, which we had to meet.
Of course, true to Murphy's law, trust something I had written to completely blow up the Friday before release Monday! The service monitor, an innocent little system tray icon which displays server status, causes service deployment to fail! Turns out the act of observing server status using a certain MBean actually DOES affect the status of the server and very badly at that. I would've called it a 'heisenberg uncertainty bug' if I had been thinking clearly about anything besides the bug itself at the time, and maybe if I had watched the particular episode of 'Numb3rs' that I did last night.
I suppose the astrologers out there would now be saying 'so you finally have evidence that seemingly unconnected things can affect each other, so why do you have trouble believing that a random scattering of stars, light years away from us, that appear to be in a certain pattern when viewed from a certain angle, affects how your day is going to turn out'. Well, this is different and I have more faith in my belief that watching the progress bar actually can affect the speed of the download; something a friend showed me could be explained by the above mentioned principle!
Anyway, the unlikely solution turned out to be the right one, the fix was checked in on Sunday evening and Monday morning dawned nice and bright. Unfortunately nightfall on the 28th brought with it another surprise; the home page of our web application was making the browser crash - not good! This started happening at 7:00 PM on release eve, long after we had stopped doing anything significant enough to cause this sort of catastrophic failure! Turned out to have a perfectly rational explanation and a trivial solution with no code changes, so we finally managed to put the artifacts up and sent the release announcements!
The next night I took Sharm and the Kids out to our favourite Japanese restaurant; Sharm's now a total sushi addict herself and the kids love the fried-chicken-like meal they serve. All release related transgressions compensated for in full!
After this, while we were quietly preparing the data sheets, samples and training material and answering questions on forums, a security vulnerability was just waiting to be exploited on the community site running our server! Discovery, a quick release with the security fix and one more to fix the feature that we broke with the aforementioned fix and we're already at 1.0.2 with a few lessons learned!
Oh yes, Samadhi started playschool on the 7th, something that probably didn't feel very important to her at the time, but the first step in what I hope will be a long journey that will be it's own reward!
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