Thilina Gunarathne

Presenting at the SC11 Doctoral Symposium : Architectures for Iterative Data Intensive Analysis Computations on Clouds and Heterogeneous Environments

2011-09-17T16:05:00.000-04:00

I'm going to present my research work on "performing parallel computations on clouds", at the SC11 Doctoral Symposium on Tuesday Nov.15th at 4.45 pm at room TCC LL1. Drop by if you are attending SC11.

Abstract: Iterative computations are at the core of the vast majority of data-intensive scientific computations. Recent advancements in data intensive computational fields are fueling a dramatic growth in number as well as usage of such data intensive iterative computations. The utility computing model introduced by cloud computing combined with the rich set of cloud infrastructure services offers a very viable environment for the scientists to perform data intensive computations. However, clouds by nature offer unique reliability and sustained performance challenges to large scale distributed computations necessitating computation frameworks specifically tailored for cloud characteristics to harness the power of clouds easily and effectively. My research focuses on identifying and developing user-friendly distributed parallel computation frameworks to facilitate the optimized efficient execution of iterative as well as non-iterative data-intensive computations in cloud environments, alongside the evaluation of heterogeneous cloud resources offering GPGPU resources in addition to CPU resources, for data-intensive iterative computations.

Cloud computing paradigms for biomedical applications

2011-09-17T11:22:00.002-04:00

This paper is an extended version of our earlier paper presented at the ECMLS workshop in HPDC 2010, which got invited for an journal publication. In this paper we evaluate the feasibility of cloud platforms to perform pleasingly parallel biomedical computations including Cap3 sequence assembly, BLAST sequence searching and Generative Topographic Mapping (GTM) interpolation. We implement these applications for Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure clouds using a simple framework we created using Cloud infrastructure services, which we call as Classic Cloud Framework. We also compare them with Apache Hadoop implementations and Microsoft DryadLINQ implementations. Since then, we have expanded on this work to implement MapReduce and iterative MapReduce frameworks for cloud environments using Cloud Infrastructure Services.

Gunarathne, T., Wu, T.-L., Choi, J. Y., Bae, S.-H. and Qiu, J. (2011), Cloud computing paradigms for pleasingly parallel biomedical applications. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. doi: 10.1002/cpe.1780

Abstract:Cloud computing offers exciting new approaches for scientific computing that leverage major commercial players’ hardware and software investments in large-scale data centers. Loosely coupled problems are very important in many scientific fields, and with the ongoing move towards data-intensive computing, they are on the rise. There exist several different approaches to leveraging clouds and cloud-oriented data processing frameworks to perform pleasingly parallel (also called embarrassingly parallel) computations. In this paper, we present three pleasingly parallel biomedical applications: (i) assembly of genome fragments; (ii) sequence alignment and similarity search; and (iii) dimension reduction in the analysis of chemical structures, which are implemented utilizing a cloud infrastructure service-based utility computing models of Amazon Web Services (http://Amazon.com Inc., Seattle, WA, USA) and Microsoft Windows Azure (Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, USA) as well as utilizing MapReduce-based data processing frameworks Apache Hadoop (Apache Software Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, USA) and Microsoft DryadLINQ. We review and compare each of these frameworks, performing a comparative study among them based on performance, cost, and usability. High latency, eventually consistent cloud infrastructure service-based frameworks that rely on off-the-node cloud storage were able to exhibit performance efficiencies and scalability comparable to the MapReduce-based frameworks with local disk-based storage for the applications considered. In this paper, we also analyze variations in cost among the different platform choices (e.g., Elastic Compute Cloud instance types), highlighting the importance of selecting an appropriate platform based on the nature of the computation.

[Submitted Version]

Optimizing OpenCL Kernels for Iterative Statistical Applications on GPUs

2011-09-11T11:23:00.000-04:00

Last year we started implementing several iterative data intensive scientific applications on GPGPU using OpenCL as a class project for the B649:Parallel Architectures and Computing class with Prof.Arun Chauhan. Even though it's a pain to program using OpenCL (at least with the current state of the frameworks), we got fascinated with the GPGPU programming and the results we obtained, which lead to the continuation of the project towards a paper. We plan on integrating this work with our iterative MapReduce work to create a distributed GPGPU programming framework.

Thilina Gunarathne, Bimalee Salpitikorala, Arun Chauhan and Geoffrey Fox. (2011) Optimizing OpenCL Kernels for Iterative Statistical Algorithms on GPUs. In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on GPUs and Scientific Applications (GPUScA), PACT 2011. Galveston, Tx.

Abstract - We present a study of three important kernels that occur frequently in iterative statistical applications: K-Means, Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS), and PageRank. We implemented each kernel using OpenCL and evaluated their performance on an NVIDIA Tesla GPGPU card. By examining the underlying algorithms and empirically measuring the performance of various components of the kernel we explored the optimization of these kernels by four main techniques: (1) caching invariant data in GPU memory across iterations, (2) selectively placing data in dierent memory levels, (3) rearranging data in memory, and (4) dividing the work between the GPU and the CPU. The optimizations resulted in performance improvements of up to 5X, compared to naive OpenCL implementations. We believe that these categories of optimizations are also applicable to other similar kernels. Finally, we draw several lessons that would be useful in not only implementing other similar kernels with OpenCL, but also in devising code generation strategies in compilers that target GPGPUs through OpenCL.

Portable Parallel Programming on Cloud and HPC: Scientific Applications of Twister4Azure

2011-09-11T10:36:00.000-04:00

Our paper on the data intensive iterative scientific applications of "Twister4Azure : Iterative MapReduce on Azure Cloud" was accepted for publication at IEEE/ACM UCC 2011. In this paper we use present non-trivial parallel applications implemented using Twister4Azure executing on Azure cloud environment utilizing up to 256 instances and tens of thousands of tasks per job.

Thilina Gunarathne, Bingjing Zhang, Tak-Lon Wu, Judy Qiu.(2011) Portable Parallel Programming on Cloud and HPC: Scientific Applications of Twister4Azure, 4th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2011) , Melbourne, Australia.

Abstract— Recentadvancements in data intensive computing for science discovery are fueling adramatic growth in use of data-intensive iterative computations. The utilitycomputing model introduced by cloud computing combined with the rich set of cloudinfrastructure services offers a very attractive environment for scientists toperform such data intensive computations. The challenges to large scaledistributed computations on cloudsdemand new computation frameworks that are specifically tailored for cloudcharacteristics in order to easily and effectively harness the power of clouds. Twister4Azure is adistributed decentralized iterative MapReduce runtime for Windows Azure Cloud.It extends the familiar, easy-to-use MapReduce programming model with iterativeextensions, enabling a wide array of large-scale iterative data analysis forscientific applications on Azure cloud. This paper presents the applicabilityof Twister4Azure with highlighted features of fault-tolerance, efficiency andsimplicity. We study three data-intensive applications − two iterativescientific applications, Multi-Dimensional Scaling and KMeans Clustering; onedata–intensive pleasingly parallel scientific application, BLAST+ sequencesearching. Performance measurements show comparable or a factor of 2 to 4better results than the traditional MapReduce runtimes deployed on up to 256instances and for jobs with tens of thousands of tasks.

Map Reduce on Azure (MRRoles4Azure)

2011-05-05T11:05:00.005-04:00

Last year we wanted to run some of our distributed parallel applications on Azure and we found that Azure did not have support for any high level distributed computing frameworks (other than the simple queue based model) at that time. This motivated me to develop a MapReduce framework for Azure using Azure infrastructure services. Even though it's based on high-latency cloud services, we were able to achieve performance comparable to Hadoop and DryadLinq for our applications, which further motivated us to release the MapReduce framework to the public.

MapReduceRoles4Azure (MRRoles4Azure) is a distributed decentralized MapReduce runtime for Windows Azure that was developed using Azure cloud infrastructure services.MapReduceRoles4Azure uses Azure Queues for map and reduce task scheduling,Azure Tables for metadata & monitoring data storage, Azure Blob storage for input, output and intermediate data storage and the Window Azure Computeworker roles to perform the computations. The usage of the cloud infrastructure services allows the MapReduceRoles4Azure implementation to take advantage of the scalability, high availability and the distributed nature of such services guaranteed by the cloud service providers to avoid single point of failures, bandwidth bottlenecks (network as well as storage bottlenecks) and management overheads.

The usage of cloud services usually introduces latencies larger than their optimized non-cloud counterparts and often does not guarantee the time for the data's first availability. These overheads can be conquered, however, by using a sufficiently coarser grained map and reduce tasks. MapReduceRoles4Azureovercomes the availability issues by retrying and by designing the system so it does not rely on the immediate availability of data to all the workers.

MapReduceRoles4Azure is designed around a decentralized control model without a master node, thus avoiding the possible single point of failure.MapReduceRoles4Azure provides users with the capability to dynamically scale up or down the number of computing instances, even in the middle of a MapReduce computation, as and when it is needed.

You can download MRRoles4Azure from here. User guide is available here. We are currently working on an Iterative MapReduce (Twister4Azure) implementation for Azure based on MRRoles4Azure. If you want to try it out, please get in touch with me and I'll provide you with the current development version of Twister4Azure.

Map Reduce in the Clouds (At that time of this presentation we used call it as AzureMapReduce)

View more presentations from Thilina Gunarathne

Generating documentation for .NET projects

2011-04-22T09:06:00.000-04:00

Coming from a Java background, I always wanted to find a way to generate JavaDoc like documentation for my .net projects. Looks like http://sandcastle.codeplex.com/ is the way to go.

Installing Sun (Oracle) JDK 6 on Ubuntu

2011-02-16T10:22:00.000-05:00

Ubuntu 10.10 installs OpenJDK as the default java distro. Often times I go ahead and replace it with closed source Sun (Oracle) JDK 1.6, in order to avoid any hiccups that I might encounter down the road with OpenJDK. It's possible to download the Sun Linux JDK distro from Oracle directly, but I always find it much easier and cleaner to do it directly through synaptic.

$sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sun-java-community-team/sun-java6
$sudo apt-get update
$sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
$sudo apt-get install sun-java6-plugin
# to set this as default java version
$sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

Do a "java -version" to ensure everything worked well.

Experience with adapting a WS-BPEL runtime for eScience workflows

2009-11-23T11:31:00.006-05:00

The paper I presented in the SC09 GCE workshop.

Abstract

"Scientists believe in the concept of collective intelligence and are increasingly collaborating with their peers, sharing data and simulation techniques. These collaborations are made possible by building eScience infrastructures. eScience infrastructures build and assemble various scientific workflow and data management tools which provide rich end user functionality while abstracting the complexities of many underlying technologies. For instance, workflow systems provide a means to execute complex sequence of tasks with or without intensive user intervention and in ways that support flexible reordering and reconfiguration of the workflow. As the workflow technologies continue to emerge, the need for interoperability and standardization clamorous. The Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) provides one such standard way of defining workflows. WS-BPEL specification encompasses broad range of workflow composition and description capabilities that can be applied to both abstract as well as concrete executable components.

Scientific workflows with their agile characteristics present significant challenges in embracing WS-BPEL for eScience purposes. In this paper we discuss the experiences in adopting a WS-BPEL runtime within an eScience infrastructure with reference to an early implementation of a custom eScience motivated BPEL like workflow engine. Specifically the paper focuses on replacing the early adopter research system with a widely used open source WS-BPEL runtime, Apache ODE, while retaining the interoperable design to switch to any WS-BPEL compliant workflow runtime in future. The paper discusses the challenges encountered in extending a business motivated workflow engine for scientific workflow executions. Further, the paper presents performance benchmarks for the developed system."

Experience with adapting a WS-BPEL runtime for eScience workflows

View more presentations from Thilina Gunarathne.

Shell scripting examples : file distribution

2009-07-14T16:59:00.003-04:00

Today I had to write a shell script to distribute a number of data files among several nodes. Following are some tips which helped me for listing, manipulating and distributing files using shell scripts.

Command line arguments
Shell scripts expose command line arguments using $1, $2, $3,.. variables corresponding to the order of args.
You can check the given number of arguments using s#
if [ $# -ne 3 ]
....
fi

Assigning the list of files in a dir to an array
filelist=(`ls /tmp`)
Arithmetic operations
result=$(($x/$y))
Looping through an array
for file in ${filelist[@]}; do
....
done
Simple for loop
for (( i=0;i<10; i++))
do
....
done
Simple while loop. -lt stands for "less than", while -le stands for "less than or equal to"
while [ $i -lt 10 ]; do
....
i++
done
Secure copy a file to a different machine.
scp $dir/$file $node_address:$dest_dir

Some helpful links...
http://www.arachnoid.com/linux/shell_programming.html
http://www.freeos.com/guides/lsst/
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/636/bash-shell-script-iterate-through-array-values/

Debugging SSL

2008-10-29T13:33:00.004-04:00

Currently we are in the process of upgrading some components in our cyberinfrastructure (catchy word huh..) in a move towards more standardised solutions. Our existing system is more or less home grown and has it's own customized SSL layer based on puretls to handle the mutual authentication based on PEM encoded X509 certificats. We are currently moving towards Tomcat based solutions for some parts of our infrastructure. Part of our challenge is to figure out how to setup SSL mutual authentication on Tomcat. Other half of the challenge is to make that work witht he existing clients of other components.

Soon it proved to be a very rough ride, taking weeks to debug, especially since I'm new to SSL stuff. If you are also new to SSL and want to debug a SSL setup, chances are high that you'll also go on the same path as I went. We tried to use the various clients (existing puretls based, jsse) to debug and figure out what's going on, hoping the stacktraces will give us a clue.. Oh...wait... We are dealing with security.. Even the error messages are encrypted (or is it security by obscurity), as any error would translate to a very small set of generic error messages. This is when OpenSSL command line tool came to rescue us..

Openssl command line program provides use with tools to verify certificates, ssl clients to test SSL enabled servers and even supports setting up a temporary SSL enables server to test your clients.

Testing the mutual authenticaton enabled server SSL setup

[me@home tmp]$ openssl s_client -connect localhost:8443 -cert client_cert.pem -CAfile server_ca.pem -state -key client_key.pem

Above command will use client_cert.pem to authenticate himself to the server and will use the certificate of the trusted CA, server_ca.pem , to authenticate the server. "-state" will give more detailed debug information. Believe me, the error codes I got from this are very specific and quickly lead us to the issue we had. Above command hinted use that something is wrong in our client certificate. This is something we never thought of earlier, as our existing system works well with these certificates. Before this we mainly thought that the error occured due to lack of interoperability between mod_ssl & much older puretls implementation.

Verifying the certificate

[me@home tmp]$ openssl verify -CAfile ca.pem -purpose sslclient client_cert.pem

The above command threw an error mentioning that the "purpose" of our client certificate is not sslclient, which in fact was the bug responsible for many of my fallen hair during the last week. Eventually we found that our existing system which is based on Puretls does not validate this certificate extensions, which made our exisiting system to work even with this bug.

All and all I found openssl command line program to be a very usefull/helpfull extensive tool which comes very handy when debuging SSL setups.

Facebook photo storage

2008-10-29T01:14:00.003-04:00

Wow... It's massive...

Stats from facebook engineering blog..

2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day
Just over one petabyte of photo storage
Serve over 15 billion photo images per day
Photo traffic now peaks at over 300,000 images served per second

Wonder how the facebook software stack looks like.. There must be lot of innovation & research going on to make their platform's scale with the above numbers, especially given that photo storage is just a small part of there offerings. Fortunately they have already put out some of the components as open source projects.

Tomcat Client Authentication with OpenSSL (.pem files)

2008-10-21T11:49:00.004-04:00

In my earlier post I mentioned how to setup tomcat to support SSL (https) using the PEM-encoded X509 certificate files. This post will be a followup to that specifying how to add SSL client authentication to tomcat using the PEM-encoded X509 certificates.


<connector port="8443" maxhttpheadersize="8192"
maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
enableLookups="false" disableUploadTimeout="true"
acceptCount="100" scheme="https" secure="true"
sslProtocol="TLS"
SSLEngine="on"
SSLVerifyClient="require"
SSLCertificateFile="/path/yourcert.pem"
SSLCACertificateFile="/path/your_trusted_cas.pem"
SSLCertificateKeyFile="/path/yourkey.pem"
SSLPassword="yourpasswordtothekey"/>

One important point to keep in mind is that mod_ssl does not honor the the tomcat default "clientAuth" parameter. You need to make sure to use "SSLVerifyClient" parameter instead of clientAuth.

Also you need to provide the certificates of the certification authority(CA), who issued the certificates to your clients. You can do it either by providing a single file and using the "SSLCACertificateFile" as above or providing a directory containing the certificates and using the "SSLCACertificatePath" attribute.

Comment Moderation Turned On!!!

2008-07-28T18:10:00.003-04:00

Thanks to a bunch of comment spammers, I had to switch "on" the comment moderation on this blog..

Hope everybody comes here would bare with it.. I'll make sure to publish the comments ASAP, unless it's a pure spam..

What if Open Source software is used for evil motives?

2008-07-21T01:53:00.011-04:00

I came across this interesting post about photographers hating Creative Commons license. One of the points discussed was that, what if somebody uses one of the photographs you put in to public domain to a purpose you don't accept. It can be a corrupted political movements or a company with an evil mission... I really don't think I personally would be comfortable with the situation, so might be the society around me. This gets much worse if you have your self, somebody else or a personal property appearing in the photo. The solution may be to add a clause to the license declaration that requires the users to get written permission from the owner of the photo before using it. I'm not sure whether Creative Commons supports it or not.. But this might ruin the motive and the advantages you get by making it open at the first place.

Luckily or unluckily I do not think my photographs are worth reusing, and I do not worry about making them available online.. But what really strike me was whether the same issue applies to the open source developments we are doing. "What if somebody uses the open source software we wrote/writing for evil motives that we do not want to contribute at all?". Been a strong promoter of open development for years, it's surprising that this did not come to my mind. May be because the usages are not so clear as in the case of using photographs. I sincerely hope nobody will use open source software for evil causes. But I'm still thinking....................

Where the hell is Matt?.

2008-07-17T14:14:00.002-04:00

This video is a must see :)...

I wish someday I'll be able to visit at least half the countries he has been to..

Real Time Flight Monitoring

2008-06-09T12:54:00.005-04:00

Wow.. This is super cool and pretty usefull, specially when your loved one's are on air. Check it out at http://www.flightstats.com/.

10 Tips to pass the Driving Test

2008-05-24T00:47:00.004-04:00

California DMV has done a great work by coming up with a set of videos depicting top 10 reasons for failing a driving test and guiding how to get through them correctly. I'll be having my driving test soon and luckily I found them today. The information in the video's helped me to clear out some of the unclear situations I had in my mind. Specially the things like "do not drive too slowly when you are under normal conditions , not slow than 10 Mph than the given speed limit" would not come to the mind of many test takers.

I'm sure these are helpful not only to pass the driving test but also as a great source of guidance. If you are a international driver who thinks of driving in USA using an International Driving Permit, I strongly recommend you to go through these videos irrespective of the driving experience you have on your country.

Cudo's to California DMV for creating them and posting them to YouTube.

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Google Code University

2008-05-21T13:07:00.003-04:00

Check it out...
http://code.google.com/edu/

Currently they have courses for Ajax, Web Security, Distributed systems & languages. Interesting stuff..

University of Moratuwa : On top of GSOC

2008-05-12T10:47:00.003-04:00

Go Mora!!!

Wow. This is super cool. University of Moratuwa,where I did my undergrad studies had the most number of Google Summer of Code 2008 applicants and the most number of accepted proposals. Congratulations to all the summer of code award winners from Mora and to the driving forces behind, Dr. Sanjiava Weerawarana & Ms. Vishaka Nanayakkara. According to the sources 18 out of 24 students are from my old department .

At this moment I'm very proud to be among the first set of Sri Lankan GSOC 2005 winners, together with Dinesh, Chathura and Indika. All four of us continued our contributions to OSS and became Apache committers and went further to become PMC members in various Apache projects giving a proof to the long term positive effects of GSOC. After the first GSOC we tried our best to do our share of promoting OSS & GSOC in Sri Lanka by word of mouth as well as by organising promotion meetings. It soooo nice when we hear that our younger generation is continuing the tradition. Keep up the great work !!!!

For those of you who wonder, Sri Lanka is a pioneer in OSS contributions in Asia. Sri Lanka has produced a huge number Apache committers, which I believe is the most from a country outside US & Europe. Most of these committers are from the University of Moratuwa. Apart from Apache, we can see Sri lankan contributors in many other OSS projects including our own Sahana. Full credit for this large number of OSS contributions in Sri Lanka should go to LSF, WSO2 and their founder Dr.Sanjiva Weerawarana.

Axis2 MTOM file download web service

2008-04-28T23:43:00.019-04:00

Sometime back I thought of writing a tutorial on deploying and accessing a web service which provides binary data with it's response using MTOM, similar to my tutorial on SwA. But I was never able to find time to write a good tutorial. On the other hand the number of queries I receive asking for a sample which can download some binary data from a web service using MTOM is increasing over the time. In here I'm going to provide a quick & dirty a very simple sample program to achieve it, hoping to improve it to a full blown tutorial some day.

The easiest way to deploy such a service in Axis2 is to deploy it as a Plain Old Java Object (POJO) service. In order to make your service return some binary data, you just need to have a method similar to the following getFile() method in your pojo class.

import javax.activation.DataHandler;
import javax.activation.FileDataSource;

public class MTOMFileDownloader {
public DataHandler getFile(String fileName) {
FileDataSource dataSource = new FileDataSource(fileName);
DataHandler fileDataHandler = new DataHandler(dataSource);
return fileDataHandler;
}
}

Now we need to write the services.xml file.

<service name="MTOMFileDownloader">
<messagereceivers>
<messageReceiver
mep="http://www.w3.org/2004/08/wsdl/in-out"
class="org.apache.axis2.rpc.receivers.RPCMessageReceiver"/>
</messagereceivers>
<parameter name="ServiceClass">
MTOMFileDownloader
</parameter>
<parameter name="enableMTOM">true</parameter>
</service>

Notice the "enableMTOM" property. Now compile the above class. Package the class files and the services.xml as a .aar file. Simplest method to do it is to create a temp directory. Then create the MTOMFileDownloader.java in that directory with the above given code. Create a new directory name META-INF inside the temp directory and copy the above given services.xml file to that. Then execute the following commands in the temp directory. You'll need to add the activation jar to classpath.

>javac -classpath ~/activation-1.1.jar MTOMFileDownloader.java
>jar -cvf MTOMFileDownloader.aar *

Now copy the MTOMFileDownloader.arr file to the services directory of your axis2 server. Now start the server. Access the generated wsdl file by going to the following location in your browser (port and host may be different based on your server).
http://localhost:8080/axis2/services/MTOMFileDownloader?wsdl

You should see a child element like following in the schema part of your wsdl.

<xs:element minoccurs="0" name="return" nillable="true" type="xs:base64Binary">

Now you can go ahead use Axis2 wsdl2java tool to generate a client stub for the service.

Note that POJO is just one of the many ways you can write a service in Axis2. You can also use a contract first (WSDL) approach or raw xml approach to write the above given service.

Enjoy!!!

Update (9/2011) : The above sample may be outdated now. Please direct your questions to Axis2 user mailing list.

Web Site Updated !!!!!

2008-04-21T03:07:00.005-04:00

It's been long due.. Finally uploaded the new site....
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~tgunarat/

Some more tinkering is on the way...

Earthquake!!!!

2008-04-20T17:32:00.002-04:00

On last Friday (04/18) morning soon after waking up, I was thinking of the scary dream I saw early in the morning, the whole house was shaking for few seconds including our bed. Only after speaking to my wife I realised that it was a real earthquake.

Eventhough it's a 5.2 earthquake, which is only a light to moderate intense earthquake, this is the most intensive earthquake I have experienced in my life. I wish this earthquake will be able to hold that record throughout my lifetime ;-) . Back in Sri Lanka I have only experienced couple of very mild once.

Seems like IU geologists are already on top it..

Jonathan talking about WSO2 & the Mashup Server

2008-04-13T23:51:00.003-04:00

Jonathan is talking with TechWebTc guys about the WSO2 Mashup server and the WSO2 as a whole..

WS-BPEL & WS-Addressing : Funny facts

2008-02-29T16:06:00.002-05:00

Quoting the WS-BPEL specification released on 11 April 2007,

"At the time this specification was completed, various Web Service standards work, such as WSDL 2.0 and WS-Addressing, were ongoing and not ready for consideration for WS-BPEL 2.0. Future versions of WS-BPEL may provide support for these standards."

Apparently the WS-Addressing recommendation was released (9th May 2006) by W3C nearly a year ahead of ws-bpel 2.0 :).

I wish there were more collaboration among the two specification groups and wish ws-bpel group used ws-addressing in the ws-bpel 2.0 specification. It would have made the life a lot easier for lot of people (well..at least my life) struggling of doing standard based asynchronous invocation using BPEL.

More on this later...

Apache Tomcat Https with OpenSSL (.pem files)

2008-02-22T12:07:00.004-05:00

Recently I setup Apache Tomcat transport level security using an already existing set of keys and certificates. Keys and certificates are OpenSSL generated PEM files. Frankly I was not familiar with these kinda of stuff and it proved to be tricky. After bit of researching, trial & error and with help of several online resources, I figured out that setting it up using APR (Apache portable runtime) is the easiest for me. Setting tomcat using APR claims to be more scalable and better than bare bone tomcat. Hence an added advantage ;-).

The document "Apache Portable Runtime & Tomcat" - proved to be very valuable to me. Following are some deviations I had to take while following the above doc. My environment was Ubuntu 7.10 / JDK 1.5.0_11/ Tomcat 5.5.25. Later I successfully followed the same procedure in Redhat too.

Requirements (as mentioned in apr doc)
APR 1.2+ development headers (libapr1-dev package)
OpenSSL 0.9.7+ development headers (libssl-dev package)
JNI headers from Java compatible JDK 1.4+
GNU development environment (gcc, make)

Extract /bin/tomcat-native.tar.gz
Execute following in the extracted folder
./configure && make && make install

If you encounter an Error saying APR not found even after installing (libapr1-dev) , then you are in the same boat as I was.
"checking for APR... no
configure: error: APR could not be located. Please use the --with-apr option."

Download APR source from http://apr.apache.org/

Run ./configure && make in the extracted directory.

Go to the extracted /bin/tomcat-native-1.1.3/jni/native directory.
sh buildconf --with-apr=/extracted_apr_source_directory
./configure --with-apr=/extracted_apr_source_dir(assume it's build as said above)
make

Uncomment and add the following to the server.xml.

<connector port="8443" maxhttpheadersize="8192">
maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
enableLookups="false" disableUploadTimeout="true"
acceptCount="100" scheme="https" secure="true"
clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS"
SSLEngine="on"
SSLCertificateFile="/path/yourcert.pem"
SSLCertificateKeyFile="/path/yourkey.pem"
SSLPassword="yourpasswordtothekey"/>
Add the following to the beginning of /bin/setclasspath.sh file. Point it to the ".libs" dir you got after building the "tomcat-native".
CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Djava.library.path=/opt/apache-tomcat-5.5.25/bin/tomcat-native-1.1.3/jni/native/.libs"
You would probably encounter the following error If you are also trying to figure out the correct combination of certificate & the key from already given set of keys and certificates.
java.lang.Exception: Error setting private key (error:0B080074:x509 certificate routines:X509_check_private_key:key values mismatch)

Refer to this doc from Thawte.
Try to find a pair with same modulus & exponent as said in the above doc.

Start tomcat using ./startup.sh or ./catalina.sh run in /bin directory.

Other references,

Is this legal? : Republishing articles

2007-10-07T11:43:00.000-04:00

I came across this article while I was doing a google search for Axis2 SOAP with Attachments support. To my surprise it is an exact copy of the article "Using SOAP with Attachments in Apache Axis2 " I published on wso2 Oxygen Tank some time back. They have retained my name as the author, but no mention about the original article. After looking in this site a bit further, I was able to find more and more copied articles. (Eg: another article written by me for wso2.org, but in this case they have included a link to the original article.)

This incident leads me to think about the legality of the above mentioned copying. It is obvious that it's not a nice thing to do and illegal. But under what law will it be illegal?. That site does not seem to have any mention of owners or maintainers. In that case what is the course of legal action (no.. I'm not planning ;-).. just curious ) somebody can take against these sort of things?.

The best way for them to provide those articles would have been to give an introduction to the article and link the rest to the original article.

- Above image by GALERIEopWEG . Of course copyrighted under creative commons :)

Ubuntu 7.10 - Gutsy Gibbon

2007-10-06T02:49:00.000-04:00

Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 seems to be coming out really nice. I've been running the gutsy beta on my laptop for about one and half months, without any major hassle. Two things which caught my eyes instantly are the 3-D desktop effects and the network manager, which takes cares of my connectivity. The power usage also seems to be improved a lot... Above all, it contains built in drivers for the chipset of my laptop.

Irony : Plug and Pray for Microsoft Mouse in Vista

2007-09-27T22:10:00.000-04:00

I've been a long die hard fan of the IBM thinkpad trackpoint, which let me use the mouse without taking my hands off the home row in the keyboard.. I miss it a lot in my new Sony VAIO notebook(it's a awesome piece of hardware for a reasonable price which deserves a separate post). Only drawback is it only has a touch pad which I hate to use.

Because of my hatred towards touch pad's, recently I bought a Microsoft wireless USB Notebook Mouse from Amazon. At the time of purchase I was bit worried whether it'll work on Linux. Believe me, it worked really well in Linux (Ubuntu Gutsy alpha). It was just a matter of plugging in the USB dongle. Mouse started running around in my linux box instantly..

Some time later I *HAD* to boot my laptop in to Vista. Here comes the irony. The MSFT mouse which worked instantly on Linux took more than 5 minutes to get installed in Vista. Each time I plug in the USB dongle on average Vista takes 2 minutes to get the mouse working.. May be MSFT thought plug-&-pray was the reason for Linux (which it used to be some time back, but no longer) becoming the choice of the Geek generation.

Overall my Vista experience turns out to be pretty bad. No wonder why Lenovo offered a windoze XP downgrade option to it's customers. Even MS Office 2007 programs started crashing on Vista, which forced me to get openoffice installed on Vista. Wish I can get my VPN to the university fixed soon in Linux, so that I won't need to boot in to Vista anymore...

- Image from robertivanc

JFLAP - Graphical tool to learn concepts of formal languages & automata theory

2007-09-25T11:25:00.000-04:00

I found this really cool piece of software by a link through our Thoery Of Computing course web site. I'm already using it to verify and test my home work. I would say this is a MUST have for a Computing Theory student.

Following is the intro that can be found at JFLAP web site.
<quote>JFLAP is software for experimenting with formal languages topics including nondeterministic finite automata, nondeterministic pushdown automata, multi-tape Turing machines, several types of grammars, parsing, and L-systems. In addition to constructing and testing examples for these, JFLAP allows one to experiment with construction proofs from one form to another, such as converting an NFA to a DFA to a minimal state DFA to a regular expression or regular grammar. Click here for more information on what one can do with JFLAP.</quote>

Installing CS161 (OS161, SYS161) on my Ubuntu Gutsy Alpha Laptop

2007-09-06T23:27:00.000-04:00

My current Operating Systems course requires us to use the OS161,SYS161,CS161-gcc,CS161-gdb bundle for the assignments. I was able to install the above things in my laptop which is running Ubuntu Gutsy Alpha (Tribe5) after going through few bumpers. Following are the problems I faced and the solutions I used (mostly found from WWW) to overcome them. Hope those will help somebody in the future.

Download the distros from ftp://ftp.eecs.harvard.edu/pub/os161/toolchain/. Sometimes you may find it easier to use the guide and the distro's available in Waterloo Uni site.
I came across the first bumper when building the binutils.

Error > crt1.o: No such file: No such file or directory
Solution install libc6-dev

On Debian/Ubuntu
#sudo apt-get install libc6-dev

Next one occurred was when compiling cs161-gcc

Error > invalid lvalue in increment
cs161-gcc requires gcc-3.4 or compatible for compiling.

On Debian/Ubuntu
#sudo apt-get install gcc-3.4
Before running the toolbuild.sh
#export CC=gcc-3.4

Following error was thrown when building the cs161-gdb.

Error > no termcap library found
Solution is to install ncurses-dev.

On Debian/Ubuntu
#sudo apt-get install libncurses-dev

I also came up with another compiler error with the sys161 downloaded from Harvard site. But downloading the sys161.tar.gz from Waterloo solved it.

If you are using bash shell ,make sure to add the following to the PATH using the .bashrc in your home directory.

/home/<you>/cs161/bin:/home/<you>/cs161/root:/home/<you>/cs161/utils

Sri Lanka - A Land Like No Other

2007-08-31T09:27:00.000-04:00

Following are some nice documentaries about Sri Lanka. They really made me feel home sick. 3 cheers to who ever the people who created these and to the once who uploaded them to YouTube.

SRI LANKA - Pearl of the Indian Ocean - Part 1 :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIld2jOue44

SRI LANKA - Pearl of the Indian Ocean - Part 2 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT46eihxtiw

SRI LANKA - Pearl of the Indian Ocean - Part 3 :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnGKP1iC_Wk

Sri Lanka, A land like no other :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7xtHnFjgN8

Buddhism and its historical monuments in Sri Lanka :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cKj4522WLI

Birds of paradise (Bird's eye view on SL) :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sM9vcAIYyc

Sri Lanka Tourism :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_Iiimlv6hc

Sri Lanka Cricket :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4arjIa0G9Fs

Sri Lanka Cricket World Cup 1996 :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccVAFXD1nVo

Improved Apache Axis2 attachment configuration options

2007-07-10T02:57:00.001-04:00

Earlier in Apache Axis2 you can only either enable or disable the MTOM and SwA capability for the outgoing messages. With that if the user has enabled MTOM or SwA for a particular service, then the response was always a MIME message, which makes some clients to fail.

As remedy to that we added a new supported value for the enableMTOM and enableSwA configurations called "optional". If the user has specified the value for enableMTOM or enableSwA as "optional" for a particular service or a operation, then Axis2 will respond using MTOM or SwA only if the request is MTOM or SwA respectively.

With the addition of the above following is the list of supported values for the enableMTOM configuration. These can be set Axis2 server wide, service wise or operation wise using the axis2.xml and the services.xml. Also these can be set programatically too..

1. <parameter name="enableMTOM">true</parameter>
Axis2 will respond with a MTOMised message irrespective of whether the request message was a mtomised message or non-mtomised message. Also this does not take in to the account whether there is an attachment in the outgoing message or not (this is due to the performance hit caused when inferring whether there is an attachment) .

2. <parameter name="enableMTOM">false</parameter>
Axis2 will respond with a Non-MTOMised message irrespective of whether the request message was a mtomised message or non-mtomised message.

3. <parameter name="enableMTOM">optional</parameter>
Axis2 will respond with a MTOMised message if the request message was a mtomised message. Axis2 will respond with a non-MTOMised message if the request message was a non-mtomised message. Also this does not take in to the account whether there is an attachment outgoing message or not.

WSO2 Mashup Server v0.1 released!!

2007-07-09T07:35:00.001-04:00

Lately I've been very quite on this blog as well in my Apache open source project commitments. Well, WSO2 Mashup Server was the excuse.. During the last five months, we've been pretty busy developing the the Mashup Server. Development of the Mashup server was really interesting and exiting, specially given that the project was more R&D focused.

Just as defining an ESB, defining a mashup server is still equally a gray area. In the WSO2 Mashup server 0.1 release we present you the core platform and our line of thinking. Download the alpha now, and let us know what you think. Your feedback is really important for us to decide whether we are on the right track.

Following are some of the core features in our 0.1 version.

Providing a platform to host mashup services written using JavaScript with E4X XML extension
- Simple file based deployment model
JavaScript annotations model to configure the deployed services
Auto generation of many resources for the deployed mashups
- JavaScript stubs that can be used to access the mashup service by clients
- TryIt functionality to try out the mashup service
- WSDL1/WSDL2/XSD documents to describe the mashup service
- API documentation

many more...

Ability to bundle a custom user interface for the mashups
Many useful JavaScript Hostobjects that can be used when writing mashups
- WSRequest : easily invoke services from within the JavaScript + E4X environment
- File : File storage/manipulation functionality.
- System : Set of system specific utility functions.
- Session : Ability to share objects across different service invocations.
- Scraper (Experimental) : Extract data from HTML pages and present in XML format.
- APPClient (Experimental) : Atom Publishing Protocol client to retrieve/publish Atom feeds with APP servers
Mashup Server Management console to easily manage the mashups
Ability to share the deployed mashups with other WSO2 Mashup server instances

My colleagues, Jonathan and Tyrell has put up much better descriptions on the foundations and admin console of the server..

Open Source Directory - Ohloh

2007-06-23T03:59:00.000-04:00

Interesting... I'm already using it to analyse the statistics about the WSO2 Mashup Server.. One really cool feature is the factoids like the following..

"Over the past twelve months, 12 developers contributed new code to WSO2 Mashup Server.This is a relatively large team, putting this project among the top 10% of all project teams on Ohloh. "

& scary factoids like

"xxxx is the only active contributor to yyyyy project. About one-third of all active projects on Ohloh are solo efforts."

Quoting http://www.ohloh.net/about/us,
"Ohloh is a resource for open source intelligence on thousands of open source projects. Ohloh collects software metrics from a variety of sources including the project's source code and the software development infrastructure used by the project's development team."

My profile in Ohloh..

WSO2mashup Server Badge provided by Ohloh..

GPLV3 Apache License Compatibility

2007-06-07T08:02:00.000-04:00

Wow... This is NEWS... I can't resist my urge to blog this one (though it's being already blogged by many others)... Hats off to all the people involved in this effort..

GPLv3 Final Discussion Draft Rationale by Free Software Foundation
<quote>1 Apache License Compatibility
"We are pleased to report that the Final Draft makes the Apache License,
version 2.0, fully compatible with GPLv3. We are grateful to the Apache
Software Foundation for working with us to achieve this long-sought goal....."</quote>

Tutorial on using Axis2 SOAP with Attachment capability to access binary data from a web service

2007-06-06T06:59:00.001-04:00

The much awaited follow up tutorial to my earlier article on Axis2 SOAP with Attachment support is now on-line in the WSO2 Oxygen Tank.

Downloading a Binary File from a Web Service using Axis2 and SOAP with Attachments
"Apache Axis2 is well supported for sending and receiving binary payloads with SOAP using several standard mechanisms such as Base64 encoded binary, SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) and SOAP with Attachments (SwA). This tutorial will walk you through writing a sample application (Web service and a client) that demonstrates how to download a binary file from a server using SOAP with Attachments."

From Server Side Mashups to Personal Web Services

2007-05-11T08:35:00.000-04:00

This presentation on Server-side mashups made by me at the SD WEST 2007 introduces Server Side Mashups as an enterprise integration tool and evaluates some of the existing tools for developing Mashups.

From Server Side Mashups to Personal Web Services

Using SOAP with Attachments in Axis2

2007-05-07T07:40:00.001-04:00

Apache Axis2 has excellent support for sending and receiving binary payloads with SOAP using several standard mechanisms such as Base64 encoded binary, SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM), and SOAP with Attachments (SwA). My article on "Using SOAP with Attachments in Axis2" will walk you through the SwA support in Apache Axis2. The article is published at the WSO2 Oxygen Tank.

This article will be followed by a tutorial on "Downloading a Binary file from a web service using Axis2 & SOAP with Attachments"....

Axis2 1.2 released

2007-05-02T09:11:00.000-04:00

Apache Axis2 1.2 has been released.

Download it from here..

New features in this release..

- - WSDL 2.0 fully support (reading, writing, and codegen)
- - POJO annotation (JSR 181)
- - JAX-WS integration
- - JAX-WS -annotation
- - Un-wrapping (Response)
- - ADB - support for union and list
- - Maven2 support
- - JSON support
- - Binary serialization (Fast infoste)
- - Codegen support for WSDL with Multiple services
- - HTTP code generation (both WSDL 1.1 and 2.0)
- - Custom deployer support
- - Message formatters
- - Message Builders
- - EJB Provider support

HELP !! HELP !! :((

2007-03-23T03:44:00.000-04:00

My best regards goes to all the open source mailing lists which I've subscribed.

Speaking at SD West 2007

2007-03-12T05:07:00.000-04:00

This time I will be presenting 2 tutorials and a class at the SDWest Conference in Santa Clara, CA.

[1] Introduction to Developing Web services with Apache Axis2/Java (March 19, 2007) 8:30am — 12:00pm

[2] Advanced Web Services using Apache Web Services (March 19, 2007)
1:30pm — 5:00pm

[3] Server-Side Mashups (March 22, 2007) 10:30am — 12:00pm

SD West brings together all the major players in the software development community. The curriculum combines the best of traditional and next-generation development in a language neutral, platform neutral environment. Featuring all the educational tracks you’ve come to expect from SD including C++, JAVA, XML, .NET, Web Services, Security and much more.

Label Cloud

2007-02-19T05:27:00.000-05:00

Following entry explains how you can add a Tag (label) Cloud widget for your Blogger blog...
http://phydeaux3.blogspot.com/2006/09/code-for-beta-blogger-label-cloud.html

BPEL-Mora research paper published

2007-02-14T09:16:00.000-05:00

BPEL-Mora: Lightweight Embeddable Extensible BPEL Engine research paper authored by Thilina Gunarathne, Dinesh Premalal, Tharanga Wijethilake, Indika Kumara, Anushka Kumar (my final year project group) got accepted for the ECOWS : Workshop on Emerging Web Services Technology 2006 held on Zurich, Switzerland, December 4, 2006.

As the main author I got the opportunity to present the paper at the conference with the generous support from my company(WSO2).

The proceedings of the workshop are now published online: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-234

Abstract of our paper. Web Services have become the de-facto standard for architecting and implementing business collaborations within and across organization boundaries. Web service composition refers to the creation of new (Web) services by combining the functionalities provided by existing ones. A process-oriented language for service composition has been proposed as WSBPEL. WSBPEL specification defines an XML based formal language and provides a general overview of the framework. However no design and implementation issues are described in it. Most of the available BPEL compliant process engines are heavy weight, complex and not extensible. This paper describes the design and implementation of an embeddable, scalable and extensible WSBPEL compliant process engine. This paper highlights the concepts and strategies that were followed during the design and implementation. Primary contribution of this paper is the design of stateless process model and the design of run time core engine using a multi-processor scheduler.

My first podcast : New Approach to Binary Data Handling in XML

2007-02-14T07:26:00.000-05:00

WSO2 Oxygen Tank is the web services and SOA developer portal maintained by our company. It consist of an store of useful articles , tutorials, podcats and faqs with up to date information on Web services technologies.

My first pod cast went live today on the Oxygen Tank. It is about the binary data handling support in Apache Axiom. More podcasts are on the pipe..

Listen : New Approach to Binary Data Handling in XML

Huge boost in Axis2 downloads with the 1.1 release

2007-02-13T06:02:00.000-05:00

Above is the (unofficial) monthly download statistics graph for Apache Axis2. This graph nicely reflects the evolution of Axis2 project. The first rise of downloads in June/July 2005 is just after the M2 release. Then there was an increase in downloads from 2006 March (0.95 release) onwards with a small rise in May 2006 (1.0 release).. The drop after September 2006 may be due to users relying too much on the nightly builds and the 1.1-RC's, which does not get included in these stats. First major peak in Nov 2006 was the 1.1 release, which is followed by 1.1.1 release in January.

These stats proves that more & more users are downloading Axis2, which in turn means Axis2 is getting the much desired fame and publicity due to it's rich feature set and the stability.

One other good stat about the Axis community is the traffic of the mailing lists. Axis user list currently on average has 33 posts per day, while the axis dev list has 31 mails per day..

More statistics are available at Apache Axis2 stats page.

Web Services are Not Slow : Axis2 performance comparison with XFire

2007-01-30T06:27:00.000-05:00

Dims, Paul, Deepal and Amila has put together an article "Axis2/Java Performance Testing Round #2 - Apache Axis2 vs. Codehaus XFire in a Contract First Scenario" showing the latest performance results of Apache Axis2 1.1.1 vs. Codehaus XFire 1.2.4, both Java implementations. Those results demonstrate that modern Web Services engines can perform at very high transaction rates.

According to the article Axis2 is on average at least 40% faster than XFire over all the tests. Also Axis2 seems to more scalable when it comes to larger messages..

3 cheers for the Apache Axis2 team (of course I'm part of that :) ) ...

http://www.wso2.org/library/588

UPDATE <2>
Hani the BileBlogger (an XFire committer) has posted a nasty stupid crappy response to the above mentioned article..

His earlier blog entry about Axis2 made me worry at that time, but this time I burst in to laughter seeing how desperate he is.. Paul Fremantle has posted a very good reply to Hani..

Apache Axis2 1.1.1 released

2007-01-10T20:43:00.000-05:00

Its been over a month since the 1.1 release of Apache Axis2 and we are happy to announce the release of Apache Axis2 version 1.1.1.

The download is available at:
http://ws.apache.org/axis2/download.cgi

Apache Axis2 is a complete re-design and re-write of the widely used Apache Axis engine and is a more efficient, more scalable, more modular and more XML-oriented Web services framework. It is carefully designed to support the easy addition of plug-in "modules" that extends its functionality for features such as security and reliability.

Modules supporting WS-Security/Secure-Conversation (Apache Rampart), WS-Trust (Apache Rahas), WS-Reliable Messaging (Apache Sandesha2) are already available. Modules supporting WS-Eventing (Apache Savan) & WS-Transactions (Apache Kandula2) will be available soon after the Apache Axis2 1.1.1 release.Please see these projects' own sites for further information.

Major changes since 1.1:
- - Performance improvements
- - Bug fixes

Known issues and limitations in 1.1.1 release:
- - ADB does not support unwrapping of response messages(coming in 1.2)
- - JSR 181/183 Annotation support (coming in 1.2)
- - JaxMe and JAXBRI data binding support is experimental
- - Simple Axis Server does not support POX/REST
- - RPC Message Receiver does not validate request against the schema
(AXIS2-1943)
- - Axis2 Idea plugin shows random behavior when XMLBeans is used

Apache Axis2 1.1.1 is a bug fix release of Axis2's 1.1 version, which was a major release since Axis2 1.0. We are striving for a simple and happy first time user experience as well as satisfying advanced users.

My Travelling in 2006

2006-12-16T11:04:00.000-05:00

Update of my total travel for this year. Altogether 41K miles. Quite a bit of traveling considering the fact that I took my first ever flight early this year.

Apache Axis2 1.1 Released

2006-11-14T09:42:00.000-05:00

Here's the much awaited Axis2 1.1 release... Please find the release note below.. You can find more information at http://ws.apache.org/axis2/

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

Just over 6 months since the original 1.0 release, we are very proud to
announce the release of Apache Axis2 version 1.1.

Downloads are available at:
http://ws.apache.org/axis2/download.cg

Apache Axis2 is a complete re-design and re-write of the widely used
Apache Axis engine and is a more efficient, more scalable, more modular
and more XML-oriented Web services framework. It is carefully designed to
support the easy addition of plug-in "modules" that extend its
functionality for features such as security and reliability.

Modules supporting WS-Security/Secure-Conversation (Apache Rampart),
WS-Trust (Apache Rahas), WS-Reliable Messaging (Apache Sandesha) and
WS-Eventing (Apache Savan) will be available soon after the Apache Axis2
1.1 release. Please see these projects' own sites for further information.

Major Changes Since 1.0:
- Significantly improved documentation
- Significantly improved support for POJO services and clients
- Significantly improved support for Spring services
- Significantly improved Axis Data Binding (ADB) to increase schema
coverage and overall stability
- Improved service lifecycle model
- Improved JMS support
- Improved handler and module interfaces
- Improved Eclipse and Idea plugins
- New Attachments API for sending & receiving MTOM and SwA attachments
- Built in support for WS-Policy via Apache Neethi
- Added support for unwrapping Web service requests
- Fixed tons of small and not-so-small bugs
- Major refactoring of release structure to make usage easy

Known Issues and Limitations in 1.1 Release:
- Unwrapping of response messages (coming in 1.2)
- JSR 181/183 Annotation support (coming in 1.2)
- JaxMe and JAXBRI data binding support is experimental

Apache Axis2 1.1 is a major new release compared to Axis2 1.0. We are
striving for a simple and happy first time user experience as well as a
satisfying experienced user experience with this release. We welcome any
and all feedback at:
axis-user@ws.apache.org (please include "[axis2]" in the subject)
axis-dev@ws.apache.org (please include "[axis2]" in the subject)
http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AXIS2

Thank you for your interest in Apache Axis2!

The Axis2 Development Team
http://ws.apache.org/axis2/


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

Features of Apache Axis2:

Programming Model
- Simple XML-centric client API with full WSDL and policy support
- Support for POJO and Spring services and clients
- Support for any message exchange pattern (MEP)
- Synchronous and asynchronous programming model
- Archived service deployment model supporting full service
 encapsulation with versioning support
- Archived module deployment model supporting controlled
 extensibility with versioning support
- Hot deployment
- WS-Policy driven code generation extensions
- Flexible service life cycle model
- Automatic support for POX (REST) style invocation of services
- Support for querying service's WSDL (with ?wsdl), schema (with
 ?xsd) and policies (with ?policy)

Supported Specifications
- SOAP 1.1 and 1.2
- Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM)
- XML Optimized Packaging (XOP)
- SOAP with Attachments
- WSDL 1.1, including both SOAP and HTTP bindings
- WS-Addressing submission and 1.0
- WS-Policy
- SAAJ 1.1

Transports
- HTTP
- SMTP
- JMS
- TCP

Supported Data Bindings
- Axis Data Binding (ADB)
- XMLBeans
- JibX
- JaxMe (Experimental)
- JaxBRI (Experimental)

Tools
- WSDL2Java: Generate Java stubs and skeletons from a WSDL document.
- Java2WSDL: Generate a WSDL document from a Java class.
- Eclipse Plugins
- IntelliJ Idea Plugins
- Maven2 Plugins
- Web application for administering Apache Axis2

Software engineers making Buns

2006-10-17T16:18:00.000-04:00

Today we had a interesting discussion, while waiting for a cab. We were talking about project managers and Charitha told a story about a Manager from a flour compnay becoming a software engineer and the nightmare he had to undergo... With this we started to wonder what happens if a software engineer started to work at a bakery making buns...

I wish he will not use test driven development, anyway there aren't much people willing to commit suicide...

First he will create something out of flour and call it "M1"(milestone 1). Nobody in his right senses will try to eat it.. If you ate it, you are screwed..

Then after some time he will start to showcase nightly build Buns (nightlies)... So when a user complains that he had stomach aches eating the buns, first answer will be "Please try nightlies, problem might have fixed in there"...

Then if the user complains that he had to go to hospital even with the nightlies, then he'll be asked to log a (bug??) report..

When the bug s fixed, bun maker will post note saying "please try the today's nightly.. I fixed the problem, But please repopen the (bug??) report if you get the palpititations again..

Then the bun maker showcases the RC-1 (release candidate) buns with a note "eat at your own risk" together with "please eat and let us know (open a blocker) if someone dies"...

At last he releases the proper version of the bun... But this time the regular bun has a hole in the middle. Bun maker was unable to figure out how to get rid of it.. He calls it a feature :)....

If a customer complains that some body got sick, the bun maker will start scolding the QA guys asking "why none of the QA people died eating those buns"..

Hmmm.. Interesting... We just have too much to get improved in our processes..

Enterprise SOA

2006-10-13T15:06:00.000-04:00

On the 24th of October, I will be speaking about the Apache Web Service stack at The Enterprise SOA Conference in Belgium.

Anne Thomas Manes is keynoting this event. Dennis Sosnoski is also participating and he will be doing a full day workshop in the following day.. I'm looking forward to meet these two great people from Axis community live in Belgium...

Axis2 release is dragging more and more... Seems like i'm going to have a tough time at Europe too...
Oh..Did I tell you that I'm the release manager for the Axis2 1.1 release.. hmmm... That experience deserves a separate blog entry. May be later..

Axis2 1.1-RC1 Released

2006-10-09T10:46:00.000-04:00

I uploaded the Axis2 1.1 RC1 release artifacts to the following locations. Please help us by downloading and reviewing them.

Download locations :
* binary and source distributions -
http://people.apache.org/~thilina/axis2/1.1-RC1/

* jars
http://people.apache.org/~thilina/maven/org.apache.axis2/jars/

* mars (addressing and SOAP monitor)
http://people.apache.org/~thilina/maven/org.apache.axis2/mars/

* Tools
http://people.apache.org/~thilina/axis2/1.1-RC1/eclipse_codegen_plugin_1.1-RC1
http://people.apache.org/~thilina/axis2/1.1-RC1/idea_codegen_plugin_1.1-RC1/

We uploaded a subset of Axis2 docs (preview versions) for the benefit of the folks who are going to try out Axis2 1.1-RC1. Some links may not work.

* Docs
http://people.apache.org/~thilina/axis2/docs/

Hello World with Apache Axis2

2006-08-18T15:00:00.000-04:00

This is a step by step guide to hosting a simple Web service with Apache Axis2 and interacting with that service using a client based on generated code.
http://www.wso2.net/tutorials/axis2/java/2006/05/29/hello-world

Apache Axis2, WSO2 Tungsten Nightly Builds

2006-08-18T14:58:00.000-04:00

Nightly builds of Axis2
http://people.apache.org/dist/axis2/nightly/

Nightly builds of Tungsten
http://dist.wso2.net/~builder/tungsten/

CSE Get Together & Panel discussion on "Shaping the IT education for the needs of tomorrow"

2006-07-29T03:37:00.000-04:00

The Annual General Meeting of the Computer Science and Engineering Society of University of Moratuwa and the CSE Get Together will be held on the 5th August 2006 at HNB towers (22nd floor) from 4.30pm onwards. This year they have brought in an idea of including a panel discussion with the topic, "Shaping the IT education for the needs of tomorrow", which would produce a concrete outcome for the betterment of the IT industry of the nation. Sri Lankan IT industry has being expanding very rapidly during the last few months. Though we produce IT graduates from various educational institutes still they do not completely fulfill the employers expectations. What are the initiatives that could be taken? What kind of changes should the educational system go through and what kind of involvement should the corporate sector have in the system? Should it be just philanthropical or a longer commitment from the corporate are expected? What kind of changes should the educational framework should go through?

We have currently planned a 2 hour panel discussion with 8 panelists.Following is the abstract and brief profiles of the panelists. Entrance for the panel discussion is free of charge, but requires prior registration. Contact cses@cse.mrt.ac.lk for more information & registration.

WSO2 is partnering with us as the Gold partner to support this event, while Virtusa, CodeGen, Mubasher are partnering with us as the Silver Sponsors.

Panel discussion will be moderated by:

Mr. Manju Haththotuwa

Founder Managing Director / CEO, Information Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) of Sri Lanka
One of the ICT Advisors to the Hon. Minister of Science and Technology.
Former chairman of E-Channelling Limited, Kelsey Homes , Kelsey Developments and Kelsey Aluminium.

The panel would consist of:

Mr.Mahesh Amaleen,

Chairman, MAS Holdings (Pvt) Ltd,
Past Chairman Sri Lanka Apparel Exporters Association

Prof. Abhaya Induruwa

Founder Head, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Moratuwa.
Principal Lecturer , University of Canterbury , UK .

Prof. Ananda Jayawaradana

Dean, Faculty of Engineering, University of Moratuwa.
Chairman, Steering committee for formulating of the Faculty of IT, University of Moratuwa .

Mr.Keith Modder

Managing Director - Asian Operations, Virtusa Pvt Ltd.
ICT Steering Committee Member for the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce.

Mr.Raomal Perera

Founder and CEO of Valista.
Recipient of the Irish Software Association's Outstanding Software Achievement Award

Prof. K. S. Walgama

Former Head, Department of Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Peradeniya.
Chairman, Subject benchmarking committee in computing of the IRQUE project.

Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana

Founder, Chairman & CEO, WSO2, Inc.
Board Member, Open Source Initiative
Visiting Lecturer, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Univ. of Moratuwa .

Abstract of the Panel Discussion

Finding the niche...

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) from the western hemisphere has resulted in a rapid growth of the service sector in the east. Firstly due to the lower cost and later for their rich resource pool and the high standard of quality in the products resulted in the birth of Silicon Valley of the east. As a result theGDPs in south east Asian countries especially India has enjoyed a rapid growth over the lasthalf a decade. These BPOs varies from IT to Finance, Accounting and sometimes Insurance. With the increasing demand for technology in the service sector, IT based solutions has become a major export. Last yearIndia reported a $40 billion worth of exports from their IT sector. During the last few years,Sri Lanka too has had the taste of their share of the pie.

But yet are we enjoying the share we are worth? Or do we have the capacity to grab a bigger slice? It is a fact that we would not be able to compete on cost with India. Their large resource pool is an evidence of their capability and their early start in the race has given them an edge. So would the strategy to focus on a niche be a better bet? Should the IT sector in Sri Lanka focus on a particular market segment as the tourism industry in Maldivesor the electronic industry in Taiwan? Should Sri Lankan companies focus towards marketing products or being effective in Business Process Integration (BPI)?

A helping hand...

The Sri Lankan IT industry as a whole has not succeededin agreeing a common direction over the years. The major players in the industry have come forth with their requirement as individual entities but not in cohesion. The lack of direction has made it difficult in laying policies and procedures and also very importantly to give focus to the education framework that supports the requirements of the industry.

The identifying the requirements of the undergraduates are very important to the educational institutes since they directly influence the employability of their products. Unlike other sectors such as healthcare, IT graduates are more dependent upon the corporate sector. The employability of the graduate depends on how well he can fulfill needs of the organization. Moreover, revision of the curriculum or the other parameters in the degree course is easily be modified in a short term.

Companies can no longer state they are serving the society by indicating the number of recruitments. With the concepts such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Social Accounting a single entity cannot act as a philanthropist. It should become an active stakeholder and focus on improving the community from which they pull resources. Taking an example of the IT sector itself, an organization should focus on improving the quality of the future graduates in an academic entity which will directly result in better quality IT graduates to the community thus indirectly better employees in the future. From the perspective of policies and frameworks, the organization should assist the government in formulating proper policies and procedures which will enable the IT sector as a whole to grow where the organization would be able to claim a part of the growth.

The governing body of the nation should believe that the growth of one sector expands many other sectors and opens up the scope formany more industries. IT being a infrastructure could bring value addition to other sectors such as telecommunication, health care, banking and finance etc. This creates more opportunities in the BPOs and creates a never ending cycle where it would enhance the living standard of the citizens.
In conclusion the IT sector as a whole should sound one voice that describes their direction in the coming years and truly believe in it. This belief should extend to acts their involvement in improving the education sector and helping the governing body to lay a proper framework on which every organization would thrive.

Pics from my March US trip

2006-07-03T21:37:00.000-04:00

Me @ SD WEST 2006 Santa Clara

Me @ Space Needle -Seattle

Me @ Stanford

Me @ Golden Gate

Back to the Desktop

2006-07-03T20:59:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I got the internet connection for my new CDMA. So far so good.. Download speeds go up to 16kbps with DAP... Much better than my Plain Old SLT phone.

My modem in the desktop was long gone and I never worried about it due to the modem in the LAPTOP. New CDMA has an inbuilt modem and connects using USB. After a long long long time I'm surfing the net from my desktop. Dependency on the LAPTOP is gone.

Next step: Try to get this going with Linux. Dial Up connectivity was the reason for me to use WINXP in home.

Now only I realised how much I am bound to the internet connectivity. I used a OS which I don't like much due to connectivity. I've used the slow Laptop at home due to connectivity.

Last Week end I had the pleasure of having lunch with GM - Consumer marketing of SLT. He told me something which I really loved to hear. "We'll be getting ADSL to our area in another 3 months" :D

Geek out & boutiquesrilanka

2006-06-29T08:17:00.000-04:00

Sri Lankan Open Source community is organizing a "Geekout" on 7-9th July at Rafters Retreat. Sounds like it's going to be real fun and interesting. Hope it'll be a nice getaway after the exams.

http://www.foss.lk/events/2006/fosssl/geekout

I found the following Sri Lankan travel information web site while looking out for more info about GeekOut. I wonder why the hell I didn't notice this site before. Seems like a very informative place to plan your week ends.

http://www.boutiquesrilanka.com/

Ministry of Defence- Sri Lanka New Web Site

2006-06-29T05:44:00.000-04:00

For the defence news and situation reports of Sri Lanka.
www.defence.lk

"Are You Ready?" gets local media attention

2006-06-25T06:15:00.000-04:00

Sunday Observer Article

"Are You Ready?" is a professional development project organized by the Rotaract Club of University of Moratuwa which is recognised as the offcial careers day of our university. We organised it for the 11th consecutive time on 10th May. It was a huge success with participation from more than 40 companies and more than 650 students.

WSO2 On News

2006-06-25T05:56:00.000-04:00

://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=wso2

FYI: I'll be joining WSO2 on August.

We got a bag full of awards at the District Rotaract Assembly

2006-06-25T05:23:00.001-04:00

16th District rotaract assembly of district 3220 - Sri Lanka happened yesterday (24th) evening at the HNB towers. Outgoing DRR Jakque Diaz and his committee made it an opportunity to recognize and accolade the clubs and rotaractors who has outshine in their activities during last year. Rotaract Club of University of Moratuwa was able to secure 4 awards for our achievements under my presidency thanks to all our hard working volunteer members.

Rotaract District Citation for carrying out a balanced set of activities in all avenues of service throughout the year. Only 9 clubs out of total 48 in Sri Lanka were able to receive this recognition.

Best Professional Development project of district 3220(Sri Lanka) for the year 2005/06 - "Are You Ready?"

Most Entertaining Reporting secretary of the year - Secretary Rtr. Milenda

Recognition for outstanding presidency - Me :)

Yesterday's assembly marked the end of another great Rotaract year lead by our dynamic DRR Jakque Diaz.
12 of our members participated for the event. It was really an entertaining evening.

I got a new CDMA phone

2006-06-25T05:23:00.000-04:00

There was an special promotion done by Lanka Bell at the Rotaract Assembly last night. They gave away CDMA phones for free under a high usage package. According to the agreement customer have to maintain a minimum bill of Rs.1000/= for 3 years. IMO a good compromise for the 12,000/= startup fee.

I got a hold of a new phone under this scheme mainly for internet connectivity. I just need to keep in mind that I must use this phone for all my calls. Then the bill will automatically go higher than 1000.= for sure. Also it'll reduce our SLT bill (avg 4500/= :( ) and my parents will be more than happy about that.

It seems they have not activitated the phone yet. Hope it'll give me more realiable connectivity than my old slt dialup.

The Ten Commandments For Computer Ethics

2006-06-01T02:41:00.000-04:00

I came across the following interesting piece of work, while looking for resources for Professional Practice (CSE,UOM) subject..

Thou shalt not use a computer to harm other people.

Thou shalt not interfere with other people's computer work.

Thou shalt not snoop around in other people's files.

Thou shalt not use a computer to steal.

Thou shalt not use a computer to bear false witness.

Thou shalt not use or copy software for which you have not paid.

Thou shalt not use other people's computer resources without authorization.

Thou shalt not appropriate other people's intellectual output.

Thou shalt think about the social consequences of the program you write.

Thou shalt use a computer in ways that show consideration and respect.

These 10 commendments were developed by Arlene Rinaldi for computer network users at Florida Atlantic University.

Full Article :Indicator: Social, Ethical, and Legal Issues

Seylan Credit Card : Interest Calculations - Learning it the hard way

2006-05-30T12:37:00.000-04:00

Two months ago I applied and received a visa gold credit card from Seylan Bank (A Sri Lankan bank which claims it self as the Bank with a Heart). I used this card extensively during my March US visit.

Conspiracy 1

The payment due for the month of March was 179,500 rupees. I received the statement on 22nd Saturday and the due date was 26th Wednesday. But the statement date was mentioned somewhere around 5th April.. The same thing happened this month and I received the statement on 19th Friday, due date 25th Thursday, statement date 5th May.AFAIK Sri Lankan postal system delivers a letter reasonably withing 2 days(most of the time overnight) from Colombo to Kalutara. I was not surprised of the reason after reading this article (Bottom 7th Page) from http://www.truthaboutcredit.org/.

Conspiracy 2

I made a payment of 165,000 rupees on 26th April, which was before the due time. I didn't care a lot about the remaining 14,XXX thinking the interest will be something around 500/= (14,000*2.8/100). What a fool I am ot think like that.... In my April statement the financial charge (interest) was calculated as 4700/= rupees. Now I have to pay 4700 rupees for that mistake...This is the explanation i received when I inquired -

Bank officer : "Interest was calculated for the whole 179,500 rupees for the whole month since you have not paid the whole amount."

Me: "What if I paid 179,499 rupees on 6th April (the follwing day to the statement date and 20 days before the due date)"

Bank officer : "Even in that case you have to pay the whole 4,700 rupees, since you have not paid 1 rupee".

Cool... Way to go bankers.. It implies that I have pay interest even for the money I have already paid...This is crasy.. I have never noticed such a statement in thier terms and conditions. It's acceptable if they charge interest for the whole amount untill the day I did the payment and then for the remaining amount there after... But charging interest even after I paid sounds pretty corrupted to me.. The customer service guy had a sarcatic smile on his face when I inquired on this, which basically sounded "I have eaten the bait"...

I researched bit about this in the internet and found there are 3 common methods of interest calculations (also see 27 th page of this ) for credit cards.. But non is as non-consumer friendly and corrupted as the bahaviour by Seylan Bank.

Conspiracy 3

The exchange rate for all my US$ to SL ruppees are more than 2.20 rupees per dollar higher than the normal. Example : I purchased 100US$ for 10300 rupees from another bank.. But when I have borrowed goods for 100US$ using the credit card, it costs me 105200 rupees.

I Central Bank : R U sleeping (The goverment regulatary body for banks)... It seems I'm not the only unhappy customer of Seylan Bank..

Please Read the followings if you are new to credit cards and is lost with interest issues. Also please note that you are paying huge amounts for that unpaid 100 or 200 rupees of your balances.. Make sure to settle the bill in full each month to avoid these traps by Banks.

http://www.truthaboutcredit.org/
http://www.topicarticles.com/credit-card-interest/
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/01/061301.asp
http://www.consumercredit.com/CC-interestCalc.htm

UPDATE : They have reimbursed the over charged interest back to my card. It seems even the seylan card centre guys are not sure about their interest policy(See above for the responses I got from them). I even got my last month's statement in time. May be they serve right only after complaints.
For a healthy relationship a customer and a bank should have a trust on each other. Anyway my trust on the bank is broken for ever...

Axis2 Performance results

2006-05-30T12:35:00.000-04:00

http://www.wso2.net/2006/05/axis2_performance_testing_round_1

Wow.. Pretty impressive. Axis2 prooves 5X performance over Axis 1.4 . I hope the comparison with other stackes too will come out soon..

The Next Monster to look out : Axis2C. It already claims 30 times more performance in MTOM for some cases..

WSO2 Tungsten 1.0 released!

2006-05-30T12:33:00.000-04:00

Following is quoted from Dr.Sanjiva's blog!

"Its my pleasure to blog that we've released our first product: WSO2 Tungsten, an application server for hosting Web services. WSO2 Tunsgten is founded on Apache Axis2 and integrates and incorporates a bunch of other bits to make it trivially easy to build services that speak both WS-* and REST simultaneously. On top of the underlying pieces, there's a very easy to use AJAX admin console that allows users to easily manage their services. It comes in two editions: one that's standalone (using an embedded version of Jetty) and one that sits on top of Apache Tomcat or the JBoss Application Server.

Oh yes I should note that WSO2 Tungsten is fully open source and released under the Apache License (v2.0). No, we don't have a licensed "up-sell" version - our plan is to give away everything we build and charge for support and maintainence only.

Interested? Give it a try and send us some feedback!"

Offline Blogging Tool : w.bloggar

2006-05-30T12:28:00.000-04:00

This is my first blog entry using the offline blogging tool from http://wbloggar.com/.
I got to to know about this through Ajith aiya.
w.bloggar is free and it even allows you to publish to multiple blogs.. Seems like an ideal tool for people with low connectivity like me..

Sadly I wasn't able to find bloglines support in it.. :(

Update: Wow.. It even let's you edit the posts.. Pretty much faster than using blogger interface to blog even when you are online.. Great tool..
More : YOu can even edit your blogger template using this...

FOSSCode 2006

2006-05-14T02:17:00.000-04:00

URL: Eran Chinthaka: FOSSCode 2006

Apache Axis2 1.0 released

2006-05-14T02:16:00.000-04:00

After nearly two years of development much awaited our loving product Apache Axis2 1.0 has been released. Even though it's an open source project almost all the contributions came from Sri Lanka, making our small island nation very proud. Also my current alma mater CSE, University of Moratuwa should receive substantial amount of that too.. You can realize it after reading the nice blog entry Dr.Sanjiva has posted describing the tough road we came. He has even acknowledge me for my small contribution. Thanks!!!

I should write a separate blog entry explaining my involvement, how i got involved , how it changed my life, blah...blah.....

[Download Apache Axis2 1.0]

Axiom 1.0 released

2006-05-14T02:15:00.000-04:00

Apache Axiom team just announced their 1.0 release. Policy 1.0.1, WSS4J 1.5, XmlSchema 1.0.2 and the mighty Axis2 1.0 will come soon.
Here is the release note.

After nearly 2 years of development and numerous incremental releases,
we are proud to announce the release of Version 1.0 of Apache AXIOM!
(Download : http://ws.apache.org/commons/axiom/download.cgi )

Apache AXIOM is a StAX-based, XML Infoset compliant object model which
supports on-demand building of the object tree. It supports a novel
"pull-through" model which allows one to turn off the tree building and
directly access the underlying pull event stream. It also has built in
support for XML Optimized Packaging (XOP) and MTOM, the combination of
which allows XML to carry binary data efficiently and in a transparent
manner. The combination of these is an easy to use API with a very
high performant architecture!

Developed as part of Apache Axis2, Apache AXIOM is the core of Apache
Axis2. However, it is a pure standalone XML Infoset model with novel
features and can be used independently of Apache Axis2.

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

* Full XML Infoset compliant XML object model
* StAX based builders with on-demand building and pull-through
* XOP/MTOM support offering direct binary support
* Convenient SOAP Infoset API on top of AXIOM
* Two implementations included:
o Linked list based implementation
o W3C DOM supporting implementation
* High performant

Thanks for your interest in Apache AXIOM!

-The Apache AXIOM Development Team

Speed Ticket

2006-05-14T02:13:00.000-04:00

Place : Alvitigala

Road : Base Line Road .. One way with 3 lanes.. Altogether 6 lanes.. One of the few 6 laned roads in SL..

Vehicles : Very few.. Only two in the visinity..

Speed : 75 Kmph recorded by Police ... 70 Kmph by my Speedo meter..

Time and Date : 4 pm on a Sunday.

Road Condition: Recently build.. Very good carpeted..

Nature of Offence : * Speeding *

A police guy came out from his hiding place with his speed meter and stopped me.. I got my first speed ticket yesterdat.. Later when i looked at the ticket it's not a fine.. But I have to appear at the *Court* wasting one whole day of mine for driving at 75kmph on a very good road with very few vehicles on a Sunday evening which will not hurt anybody.. This is ridiculous.. I'm not going to comment more on this since now it'is a matter on court..

BTW my brother in law got hit by a bouser on his way to airport to pick me.. His vehicle was like gun fired when I see it with 6 to 7 holes on one door... The comment he has received from the bouser driver was "These things are daily happenning to them".. Fault ws completely on the Bouser drivers hand.. But we had to repair our car from our insurance money.. What is the punishment Bouser driver got for doing his daily routine accident.. Nothing.. And he continues to do that even in the next day.. What did Sri Lankan police do... Nothing...

Sanjiva Weerawarana: Sri Lanka changes timezones!

2006-05-14T02:08:00.000-04:00

Well Said... More or less the same things I wanted to blog..

Our Cabinet passed this bill without any question. According to my knowledge this cabinet bill didn't had any solid points or reasoning behind it's proposal.

May be our president wants to his name to be mentioned with the new time.. Our people mentioned the earlier time as "Pres. Chandrika time" to avoid the confusion.. May be current president wants the new time to be called as "Pres.Mahinda Time". Who knows???

URL: Sanjiva Weerawarana: Sri Lanka changes timezones!

Dial Up in SL sucks...

2006-04-16T00:41:00.000-04:00

These days I'm having serious difficulties in connectivity using my dial up connection. Connectivity is very shaky due to a noise in my phone line. This has drastically reduced my online presence in my blog & in mailing lists complaint I filed today may be the 20th fault report I made to my service provider regarding this noise :(..
Eventhough I live just 27 miles away from the capital of SL, Dial up is the only available option I can get connected to the internet from my home..No broadband, no ADSL..

May be the time is right to look for a another telephone service provider..

I can't imagine the increase of productivity if I had 24/7 broadband connectivity.. But I have to bare the fact that I'm living in a 3rd world country..

Google SoC is back : Summer of Code 2006

2006-04-16T00:34:00.000-04:00

http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html

Google SoC 2005 is one of the best or simply the best program i ever took part. Google organizes this with pure intentions at the back of their minds. At least way more pure than their competitors..

Four Sri Lankan projects were able to get in to the 400 SoC award winning projects list. I was fortunate enough to be one of that four.. At the successful completion of the project we received a large sum of money (4500$ means quite a lot in SL). But it is more than the money. It is the motivation, recognition, more opportunities, networking... SoC helped me to enhance my presence in the Open Source world.. Apart from me it opened eyes of most of my friends towards open source.. I really love the program.. SoC even made me to be hosted by Chris DiBona for a lunch at the Google along with few other SoCers..

3 Cheers for Chris DiBona for the great idea and being able to convince the Google administration one more time.. Last time 400 were selected among IIRC 12000 proposals. This time the number of proposals will definitely go higher with the already given publicity...

SoC is very different to some of the competitions organized by other top ranking software companies with loads of marketing and secret agendas. I have first hand experiences with some of those crappy competitions. Most of their budget is spent in publicity and a very small portion for students. Even with that they force students to use their technologies.. How smart.. Getting tomorrows industry leaders to use their technology.. Google never wanted us to use any of their technologies.. They never get in between mentoring organizations, when selecting projects.. Only requirement is for that project to be something worthy to the open source world...

SD West 2006 : Handling BInary Data with Apache Axis2

2006-03-27T05:45:00.000-05:00

Slides of the talk I did at SD West 2006 Conference...

Slides

I'm On the Go - Visiting US

2006-03-15T21:13:00.000-05:00

Wrote this post sometime ago... Forgot to publish.. Please bare with me...

Me and Samisa came to US on last Monday... This is my first visit to US and it was almost 24 hours journey... We had a transit at Narita and then straight from there to Seattle..

We were fortunate enough to fly Sri Lankan from Colombo to Narita. The crew was very friendly, we felt much safer with them. This helped me a lot to overcome the fears of my first airborne journey... Although it took our nervous off at Narita when the plane suddenly took off again when it has almost touched the ground.... Pretty scary for a new bie.

Narita Airport is should be probably one of the largest airports in the world. The internet connection there was really fast and I was able to download Gentoo latest CD in less than 20 mins... Downside of Narita is nothing is free at Narita... Not even a glass of water.. This is the first time I understood the worth of water which we take for granted in Sri Lanka.

We flew United from Narita to Seattle. I got the worst possible seat in the flight. Middle seat of the Middle row.. Plane was fully packed and the crew is not as friendly as in Sri Lankan. I barely saw a smile on some thier faces. Anyway not bad for the price we pay...:D

Seattlle is a cool place.. (of course really cold)... We are staying in Redmond Inn... One of the oldest inns around.. A pretty good place... Redmond is around 25 miles away from Seattle..A town which was famous for cyclists in good old days...

I'll be staying in Seattle for 6 days and then fly to Santa Clara where i'll stay another 8 days...

Our main prob is drinking water.. A bottle costs 2$... hell.. 200 Rs in SL...

In the heart of Silicon Valley

2006-03-15T21:09:00.000-05:00

After the MSFT interop plug fest (more on it later) I headed down to Santa Clara from Seattle to participate in the SD WEST 2006 conference. Unfortunately my travel agent wasn't able to to find me a flight directly to San Jose, which cause me to fly to SFO. SFO is about 30 miles down from Santa Clara, but the taxi cost is around 150$ (hmmm.. It was around 60$ for 30 miles up there in Seattle:( )..

Wow... I was able to drive by most of the big shot software companies on my way.. Oracle, Macromedia, ... Comparatively this area is not as flashy as in Redmond, Seattle area, where the roads are well maintained and had loads of fancy cars..Though I'm a average vehicle lover seeing all these vehicles drove me crazy..If you are a fancy car maniac, don't go there... According to the locals it was MSFT money which makes that impact.

My hotel is barely just more than a mile away from the Santa Clara Convention centre, which gave me the crazy idea of walking in the morning to the convention hall. Walking was not all bad if it wasn't for the cold. You won't be able to see much people outside. They spend most of their time either inside houses or inside their cars, which might be the reason behind the weired looks I got on while walking my way..

I did my first talk yesterday together with Michele and Anand. It was a half-day tutorial on web services interoperability.I represented Apache Axis2, Michele WCF, while ananth represented BEA weblogic.. It seemed like audience took it well, though we ran out of time a bit.. IMHO we spent too much time on security stuff..

Now I'm preparing for my next talk, which is on tommorow and about Apache Axis2 & MTOM. The audience seemed to be not that techie as I expected.. Now I'm doing major changes my presentation in order to suite to this audience..

On your way from Linux to Solaris

2006-02-21T11:26:00.000-05:00

Today I setup Axis2 in ws.zones.apache.org machine which is running on Solaris. I had to undergo few pains due to my lack of knowledge in Solaris. One instance was when I tried to use "wget", which later I found to be available but not available in the path in Solaris.

Following blog showed me how these valuable apps are bundled and hidden in Solaris + few more tricks for Linux users to migrate to Solaris.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/02/27/Linux-Solaris

FYI : "wget" can be found at /usr/sfw/bin

Life ain't Easy... Of course when Exams r in the corner

2006-01-16T11:11:00.000-05:00

Though my exam is not over yet , here I'm back to blogging...May because my hopes about this exam is over...:((

BTW These days I’m formally learning about what I have been doing for the last one and half years. I’m took the “Advance Software Development” class this semester and the exam is on Monday(Day after tomo). It was a class which had very good up to date coverage on current industry. Design patterns, Anti patterns, S/W reengineering, Distributed Computing (Using web services), SOA & ESB are some of the topics discussed in the class. I liked the class lot due to most of the above things are interesting and makes good sense to me.

But now at this very moment I’m left with the problem of what to learn for the exam, because there were neither any notes took down by me nor any recommended book. As a result I’ve been reading hell a lot of online articles for the last two days. Following are an interesting sub set of articles I read up to now. Hope this lineup would help somebody in the future(At least me:) ).

Service-Oriented Architecture expands the vision of Web services http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soaintro.html
· A taste of "Bitter Java"- How antipatterns can improve your programming
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/j-bitterjava/index.html
Enterprise service bus http://www.sonicsoftware.com/solutions/soa_enterprise/enterprise_service_bus/index.ssp
· What Are Design Patterns and Do I Need Them? http://www.developer.com/design/article.php/1474561
· A Survey of Common Design Patterns http://www.developer.com/design/article.php/1502691
· Refactoring To Patterns Catalog http://www.industriallogic.com/xp/refactoring/catalog.html
· Enterprise Service Bus – Download the free chapter http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/esb/
· Aspect-oriented programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming
· Service-Centric vs. Message-Centric ESBs http://www.capeclear.com/technology/messaging.shtml

Apache Axis2 .93 released

2005-12-02T21:09:00.000-05:00

Apache Axis2 team is proud to announce the 0.93 release. You can download the release from: http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/ws/axis2/0_93/ (If you can not find the distribution in the mirrors, please use the back up sites ) This release includes the following features:...

release note : URL: Eran Chinthaka: Apache Axis2 0.93 Released

Software Projects :)

2005-12-01T00:54:00.000-05:00

BPEL-Mora Blog

2005-11-28T03:09:00.000-05:00

BPEL-Mora is our final year group project at Computer Science & Engieering Department, University of Moratuwa. Objective of BPEL-Mora is to develope a BPEL4WS implementation on top of Apache Axis2. In addtion to that we are going to develop a real life demonstration application which will use the BPEL-Mora engine.
Our project is supervised by Dr.Sanjiva Weerawarana (LSF / WSO2).

BPEL-Mora blog, where we note down our progress & refrences can be found at http://bpel-mora.blogspot.com/.

The Bpel-Mora project web site can be found at http://www.cse.mrt.ac.lk/projects/batch02/project10/

My Article (Axis2 Team Interview) on CACHE get's the Attention of Sunday Obeserver!!!

2005-11-20T14:55:00.000-05:00

http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2005/11/20/mag02.html

Originally this was published in our magazine CACHE.... That CACHE article got the attention of one of the IT writers of the above news paper and he went on to publish it in Sunday Observer.

There were couple of typos and the image which came with the article is not the best Axis2 team pic. Nevertheless I'm sure this article will bring laymens attention on to what's going on in SL OSS movement...

Catch me Live at SDWEST 2006

2005-11-14T05:56:00.000-05:00

My class Handling Binary Data With Apache Axis2 (MTOM, SwA) has been accepted for the SDWEST 2006 conference. It's a 90 minutes class targeted for an intermediate audience. My current abstract plan for the talk is,

The Binary Data Problem with XML
SwA/MTOM
What is Apache Axis2
MTOM architecture in Apache Axis2
Why MTOM is so different in Axis2
MTOM Demo /(Interop with WCF ???)
Secure MTOM Demo
SwA Demo

Apart from Axis2/MTOM class I'll be participating at the Web services interoperability tutorial representing Apache Axis2 & Apache Kandula2.

Want learn Axis2/MTOM from me... Then be there at
SD West 2006: March 13 - 17, 2006 — Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA

With Kind Collaboration

CSE exhibition is over....

2005-11-07T23:24:00.000-05:00

hmmm.. time to take a good brake...

I showed two exhibits (Axis2 MTOM & Apache Kandula2) at the exhibition. Published CACHE... Sold CACHE... Did two one hour interviews about open source for the Radio CSE. First one with Mr.Eran Chinthaka (Apache PMC) about open source development and it's impact on SL .Second one was with Mr. Buddhika Siddisena on Linux and LUG's.. All and all I'm satisfied and it was a good experience...

Following is a picture of my stall... I used open source style(all others got them printed & I was late for the print) for my poster and it got quite a good attention...

Follwing is the UMCS stall which was next to my exhibits..

CSE 20th Anniversary Exhibition

2005-11-04T15:06:00.000-05:00

Yesterday(3rd Nov) we inaugurated the 20th Anniversary exhibition of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa.. We inaugurated CACHE at the same e event. WE gave the first copy of CACHE to our chancellor Vidjajothi Dr. Ray Wijewardana. All were pretty impressed about the CACHE magazine...

Today(4th Nov) is the first public day of the Exhibition. There was a decent crowd. I put Apache Kandula2 as my exhibit.. Had very good responses... Specially from our under grads, but now my throat is aching by describing Kandula...

In the evening I interviewed a prominent open source developer in Sri Lanka on behalf of "Radio CSE", which is broadcasting parallel with the exhibition...

The exhibition will be over by tomorrow (5th Nov).

Publishing "Cache" Magazine

2005-11-01T15:13:00.000-05:00

Just came home from the press. It's already 2 Am here. This is the third consecutive day I'm coming home very late due to this magazine publishing, Finished all the page layouting. Now it's up to the printer to get it right and on time...

Sometimes I get the feeling "Why we are spending so much of our efforts and time on this"... At last it's self satisfaction & the experience... I love both...

Waiting on my toes to see the product of our efforts. This time it has 48 pages & 20 articles. More than thrice of the normal Cache magazine. So far so good. {Below-the yellow letters in middle} is our front page. Of course not attractive as much as IT Times front page;-)....

Cache Magazine will be sold at a very nominal price (most probably 20 rupees) during our Exhibition. (CSe 20th anniversary exhibition on 3 rd, 4th & 5 th at University of Moratuwa).

CACHE - The IT magazine that gives you the extra byte

2005-10-28T08:09:00.000-04:00

"Cache" is an computer/IT magazine which is the official publication on University of Moratuwa Computer Society. Me and Tharanga (One of my good friends) are the editors of "Cache" for this year. These days we are working hard to get out a special edition for our departments 20th anniversary exhibition.

So far so good... Currently we've been able to get nearly 25 articles (much more than we expected), including some specialise articles from well renowned intelectuals. Lenovo and Ramedian has agreed to sponsor the magazine. We'll be printing 5000 copies this time. Most of them will be distributed at the exhibition, while a good amount will be released to leading book shops.

Have my fingers crossed to launch the magazine with the exhibition inaugeration. I can guarentee that this "Cache" will be the most sought after IT magazine in the Country when it comes to the content.

Following are some of the content.....,

CSE department - Beyond Excellence
Using IT in Local Languages
MVC
Ruby & Ruby On Rails
SoftEye - Winner of BCS Best Quality Software Awards
Transactions - going distributed
Apache Axis2 Team Interview
Project Success
Fired by Firewalls
WIMAX
Storage Area Networks
Thin Clients
Ubuntu
Windows Vista
How VLSI chips are designed
Creating your own USB lamp
Virtual Reality 4 medicine
XBOX
Lenovo

On 7th, Make sure to rush in to the leading bookstores to reserve your copy of "Cache".

Summer of Code award list is out !!!!!

2005-10-27T10:30:00.000-04:00

I was not blogging anything for the last few days.Not becuase there's nothing to blog... But due the fact that I was so busy with studies and other stuff happening in our department...

Google has put up the list of summer of code award receivers...
You can find my name under the Apache Software foundation list. Also my location is marked in the map... Wonder what happened to other 3 Sri Lankans in the map. Sri Lankans seems to have a prominent palce, When considering the location distribution of the SoC award winners(of course not much as USA, but far better than most of other countries).

The new theme of open source

2005-10-19T05:11:00.000-04:00

This is a cover of a local IT magazine in our country....

A new definition to free and opensource. Wonder whether she is "FREE" .. Free as in free speech ;-).

Now I'm rethinking of what to put in to the cover of the IT Magazine "CACHE" which I'm editing...."Cache" is the official publication of University of Moratuwa Computer Society. Now me and my co-editor are going around the uni to find a "open" girl. :D

Source blog.

Changing My Blog Address

2005-10-11T22:40:00.000-04:00

http://thilinag.blogspot.com/

Earlier address looked bit too long... Thought of switching to this one... Sorry for the inconvienience caused.. By the way if anybody know who owns http://thilina.blogspot pls let me know. Some absent minded guy is keeping the address without publishing the blog.

Google Reader is out ...!!!

2005-10-11T22:10:00.000-04:00

http://www.google.com/reader/
As a GOOGLE admirer I was so thrilled to hear the news. This is what I was awaiting for long.... Feed reader is the only option which kept me bound to bloglines.I admire not (only) because I received a Gooogle SoC grant ;-), but due to the fact that their services are simply great and easy to use...

This time things don't look as good as other products. I had to spend bit of a hard time to get subscribed to my own bloglines blog. Searching for blogs is a great feature, but if it gives some crappy feeds then no point of offering it. In my case google reader found bloglines news feed instead of my blog feed. Still bloglines outclasses google by their one click subscription feature. At least Google Feed *Should* have had the subscription support natively for thier own blogspot blogs, which even bloglines support..
Subscription and unsubscription(didn't work yet) takes a long time.

Conclution : Anyway have to stick to bloglines for some more time. Google should have named the reader as "Alpha" rather than Beta (Don't forget... Even Gmail is still beta). First impressions count a lot.

Am I job secured (just kidding ;-) )

2005-10-07T00:40:00.000-04:00

if (big-name open source projects.contains(Apache Axis2 or Apache Kandula))
{

// I'm already hired or I don't need a job :))

}

Brian says, "At this point ask yourself, 'How many open source companies are out there?' It's a trick question. Is Google an open source company? The answer is yes."

And Google is only one of thousands of companies competing for top open source developers. Brian says, "I can't go around hiring leaders from big-name open source projects. They're all hired. If they don't have day jobs it's because they don't need them."

Finding an open source programming job

"Any Standard without a test suite doesn't exist"

2005-10-06T23:41:00.000-04:00

Strongly agreed...Atleast the Interop scenerios..I've expereinced a huge difficulties getting our Axis2 guys to fix some things according to standards. (The things i needed for Axis2).. How easy my life would have been If there were any interop or test -suite for those specs.

That is the conclusion of test-driven development. If you dont have features in your code that arent/cant-be tested, then you shouldn't have standards without test suites. Without the suite, there is no way to qualify conformance. Yes, there is interop, but that doesn't measure how well the implementations conform to the spec, only that they are inconsistent.

URL: "Any Standard without a test suite doesn't exist"

2005-10-05T12:10:00.000-04:00

Get, Set , Ready , Go with "Mambo"

I put up my first test drive site with MAMBO -open source CMS. MAMBO needs you to have only php & Mysql in your server.

There are enough and more online hosts providing PHP & MySql free hosting. My choice was fwsh.com for hosting. The best feature I've seen in fwsh.com is we can upload zip files and extract on the server.

Need to tinker and customise the things. Following site is just an educational exercise. But it was so easy that there was nothing to learn ;-)

http://www.thilina.fwsh.com/

2005-10-05T12:09:00.000-04:00

WS-TX goes to OASIS

The beginning of the end for multiple competing Web Services transaction standards:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/members/200510/msg00000.html

via http://jim.webber.name/

2005-10-05T12:05:00.000-04:00

Five reasons NOT to use Linux

Following articles teaches me enough to stop debating with my MSFT ambassoder (believe me they are MSFT ambassodors) friends saying Linux is better than windows.

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS8124627492.html

2005-09-28T04:52:00.000-04:00

Google expected to build campus at NASA Ames
1 million-square-foot complex envisioned as heart of Valley

As a Google Summer of Code scholar, I always have faith on GOOGLE... Google has done lot of wondors during it's 7 years of existence. It's always nice to hear good news about GOOD companies.

Google Inc. is expected to announce plans today to build a 1 million-square-foot campus at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, sources familiar with the plan said Tuesday.

The Internet giant, which has been looking for expansion space during the company's extraordinary growth spurt, plans to build offices, housing for workers, roads and infrastructure on a vacant section of the sprawling NASA facility in the heart of Silicon Valley.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/28/GOOGLE.TMP

2005-09-27T13:17:00.000-04:00

Apache Axis2 0.92 Released

The Apache Axis Development Team announced the availability of the version 0.92 of Apache Axis2.
You can download the release from:
http://ws.apache.org/axis2/download.cgi

This release includes the following features:

Complete XML infoset support for AXIOM
AXIOM, a SOAP specific streaming XML infoset model for SOAP 1.1/1.2 messages
Support for one-way messaging and request response messaging
Modules, mechanism to extend the SOAP processing model
Archives based deployment model
WSDL2Java code generation tool for stub and skeltons
XMLBeans based data binding support
Support for WS-Addressing, both the submission and final versions
Client API
REST web service support
HTTP transport support
SMTP transport support
TCP transport support
MTOM/SWA attachments support
SAAJ implementation
WS-Security support using WSS4J
Support for context hierarchy serialization
and numerous bug fixes after 0.91 release

The release include following tools:

Admin Web App
WSDL2Java, eclipse Plugin/Command line version
Service Archive Wizard, eclipse Plugin
Module Archive Wizard, eclipse Plugin
Service Archive Wizard, IntelliJ IDEA Plugin