September 13th..

September 13th - yes, yesterday was a day to remember for couple of reasons.. First, I completed one year in the industry after graduating. Time has flied so fast and looking back, I consider myself to be lucky to have joined one amazing company for my first job and have worked with an amazing set of people while learning and contributing to the open source community.

Second - it was the opening day of one remarkable event - yes, it is WSO2Con2011. It was my first experience in attending an international IT conference.  I am sure it was a very fruitful & memorable one for all the attendees with priceless knowledge and experience gained. 

Here I will sketch some notes on three of the sessions that I attended.

After the grand opening of the event owing to Sri Lankan traditions, we listened to founder & CEO-Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana's welcome speech which was inspiring.

Titling it as - 'Causing troubles!', he gave a complete overview of WSO2 with related to history, technology, business, culture, people and Sri Lanka. Being a hard core technology company which was started with the vision of rethinking what middleware is, it has got its own unique features which powered it to compete head on with many leaders in the industry.

Self questioning & reinventing always, open model of operating, being driven by meritocracy, respecting to personal vision of self driven people, dedication and everyday learning are few out of the many that he mentioned - which has made WSO2 to go a long way with in 5 years.

He concluded the session with a nice quote from Mahathma Gandhi - "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

1st tech talk of track 1 after lunch was on ESB. Hiranya Jayathilake has titled it as - Swiss Army Knife of SOA.

EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) is one of the toughest problem that an architect would face. He explained how ESB comes to rescue in EAI and how to distinguish a good ESB from just ESB by looking for the support for various transports, QoS features and integration patterns. 

Although it is true that ESB is the swiss army knife of SOA- by providing various set of tools for different purposes, architects should avoid the myths regarding the ESB - such as ESB is the silver bullet that solves all the problems, it is the shortcut for achieving SOA etc. Rather, ESB is only a key enabler for SOA and the architects should select the right tool for the right task.

Then WSO2 ESB was explained in detail with regard to its functional components, messaging model with pipe/filter pattern achieved through mediators and sequences, features and sample use cases.

I attended track 2 for the second tech talk since the abstract of that case study was of interest to me. 

This case study was presented by Andreas Wichmann of T-Systems on how WSO2 product stack is integrated in Connected-Car project.

Among the many reasons-that he explained in detail for integrating the project with WSO2 products, following were of main focus...

-Middleware stack not only consisted of ESB, but also provides support for governance, identity management and security solutions,
-high availability, scalability and load balancing,
-ease of configuring, installing, integration and patching,
-support for content based routing and fault handling,
-support for SAML, XACML and X.509,
-OSGi
-Stratos for Connected Car as a service
 
Above I mentioned about only three sessions out of many that I attended.
I stop for the moment, looking forward for another day full of brain storming sessions on SOA & Cloud.