We took our time doing this release, more than five months, but in that time we managed to squeeze in a bunch of features big and small, that we felt were really critical when creating Mashups for Personal, Enterprise and Community use. Of these, I would say data services, security, gadget and OpenID support are the coolest 'big' features we added.
As far as I'm concerned, just getting data service creation into the Mashup Server doubled it's usefulness for almost everybody out there! Now, with mostly mouse clicks and just by stepping through a wizard, you can expose information from a database, spreadsheet or CSV file as a web service! We always had the ability to create and expose data services using the underlying WSAS, but now data services are first class citizens on the Mashup Server, so I can create, edit, delete, tag, comment and rate them from the UI, just like any other Mashup!
I keep remembering projects in a past life, where reading some data from a few tables, applying some business logic to make it a little more useful and then exposing the result as a web page and/or service was such a complicated task that took up days of my time. Using the Mashup Server, I can pretty much achieve the same result in minutes! Mashups you always dreamed of, that combine data from a text file on your desktop and you company's ERP with information on the web and write the results to a database, are now a few clicks away!
Another feature we always felt we needed, especially for the enterprise user, was the ability to secure services. Now all it takes is a few clicks, because you just need to chose one from a list of common security scenarios to be applied to your service! On the other side, you can also call secured services now, using our new and improved WSRequest object.
We also added another another ultra-cool pair of features, a gadget interface for Mashups and a dashboard on which to host them! This would be pretty useful in enterprise scenarios for the manager who wants to see an overview of his or her business in a single page, but it's also loads of fun for everybody else! You can add any Mashup to your own dashboard or iGoogle, create your own custom gadget interface starting with a default template and even import external gadgets into your dashboard. Tyrell wrote about having fun with gadgets here!
OpenID has been the hot new buzzword in the security space and we've got full support in the Mashup Server now. You can just login with your OpenID and if you haven't got an account on the server, you'll be registered, verified and allowed to login, without ever needing to fill a form or key in a password. Jonathan blogged about what WSO2 has been up to on this front.
Besides these, there are a quite a few other improvements that we made since 1.0; over 300 in all! If you really want the details, it's all in our Issue Tracker where everyone logged everything, bugs, improvements, new features and wishes. It wasn't easy getting everything into the release (and we finally had to postpone a few items) but it was fun, educational and something we can look back to with pride!
If you've already downloaded 1.5, taken it for a spin and have a compliment, complaint or wish, please do let us know!
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
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