WSO2 Business Activity Monitor 1.1.0 Released

WSO2 Business Activity Monitor (WSO2 BAM) is a tool designed to exercise Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). WSO2 BAM is intended to serve the needs of both business and IT domain experts to monitor and understand business activities within a SOA deployment. It is specifically designed for monitoring SOA deployments, and can be extended to cater for other general monitoring requirements as well.

New Features:

• Support for Oracle DBMS
• Error category monitoring for WSO2 ESB mediation data
• Improvements to analytics summary calculations, storage and visualization
• Support for deployment on JBoss, Apache Tomcat, and WebLogic Application servers
• Improved P2 based provisioning and feature management support
• Support for deleting Monitored Servers

WSO2 Webinar - Business Processes with Human Smarts

What is a business process? A series of steps that need to be performed in order to provide goods or services. Processes that used to be performed by humans are becoming increasingly automated by enterprise IT, allowing them to be performed more quickly and reliably and at much greater scale. But there can be unintended consequences - reverberation of failures, lack of accountability, an inability to handle situations outside the norm.

So why are business processes challenging to get right? Getting it right often means striking a good balance between automation and using the wisdom and flexibility of the human mind. But the technologies and systems for automating interactions which include humans differs substantially from automating interactions among software applications. This gulf has been difficult to bridge. Until now.

The recent introduction of two new standards in this space - BPEL4People and WS-Human Task - enables organizations to extend automated systems smoothly to include human interaction. WSO2 supports these new capabilities in the latest release of the WSO2 Business Process Server.

Your presenter, Milinda Pathirage, will cover the following topics:

Scenarios highlighting business process involving humans Insights into BPEL4People and WS-Human Tasks Overview of the WSO2 Business Process Server Review of the new human-interaction features of the latest version of the WSO2 BPS

Who should attend:

Architects and developers expanding their toolkit to include business processes

Business process analysts

Consultants and analysts specializing in SOA

Milinda Pathirage is product manager for the WSO2 Business Process Server and is an active contributor for Apache ODE project. He brings a wealth of knowledge on business processes and how enterprises leverage these technologies today.

MySQL with C/C++ - My First BLOG post

MySQL with C/C++

WSO2 Business Process Server 2.0.0 Released

WSO2 Business Process Server (WSO2 BPS) 2.0.0 is released few weeks back.

WSO2 BPS is an opensource BPEL process engine which support BPEL4People and WS-HumanTasks

New features are:

• BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask Support(Experimental)
• Instance cleanup scheduled task for production deployments
• Component manager to install and uninstall features (provisioning support)
• External service invocation via JMS
• XPath extension support
• Various bug fixes and performance improvements for Apache ODE

WS-HumanTask support is in its early stages. The upcoming releases will provide comprehensive support for Human Tasks. 

Component manager is a cool feature which enables you to install other features to BPS server. For instance, now you can install WSO2 ESB or any other WSO2 products' features to the BPS server itself. 

You can find a sample XPath extension for WSO2 BPS here.

WSO2 BPS is an opensource product. If you found an issue, please raise a jira at https://wso2.org/jira/browse/CARBON under BPEL and HumanTask components.

Please feel free to fix issues and attach patches as well ;)

How to enable Google Buzz

If you haven't offered Google buzz yet, you can try it by enabling multiple inboxes in Gmail Labs and set is:buzz in one of the empty panes.


Reference: http://aext.net/2010/02/12-undocumented-tricks-for-google-buzz/

Batch Resize Images in GIMP

It is always required to resize a set of images at once. So that, no need to do it one by one. Let's see, how this can be achieved using GIMP image editor in Ubuntu.

We are using the batch mode of GIMP to do image processing from the command line. Let's write a simple script in Scheme language to resize a set of image files.

(define (batch-resize pattern width height)
(let* ((filelist (cadr (file-glob pattern 1))))
(while (not (null? filelist))
(let* ((filename (car filelist))
(image (car (gimp-file-load RUN-NONINTERACTIVE filename filename)))
(drawable (car (gimp-image-get-active-layer image))))
(gimp-image-scale-full image width height INTERPOLATION-CUBIC)
(gimp-file-save RUN-NONINTERACTIVE image drawable filename filename)
(gimp-image-delete image))
(set! filelist (cdr filelist)))))

This particular script takes a pattern for filename, desired width and height as inputs and resize all image files that are matched. This script overwrite the existing file. In order to run the script, save it with .scm extension in the ~/.gimp-/scripts/ directory.

Then goto the directory which contains images, then run the following command to resize images.

gimp -i -b '(batch-resize "*.JPG" 604 453)' -b '(gimp-quit 0)'

The above command will resize all the image files end with .JPG to 604X453

The above script can be customized to any other image processing requirements as well. Refer the Help -> Procedure Browser in GIMP for more operations.

The following script rename the resized image file by adding 'a' to the beginning of the file name

(define (batch-resize-rename pattern width height)
(let* ((filelist (cadr (file-glob pattern 1))))
(while (not (null? filelist))
(let* ((filename (car filelist))
(image (car (gimp-file-load RUN-NONINTERACTIVE filename filename)))
(drawable (car (gimp-image-get-active-layer image))))
(gimp-image-scale-full image width height INTERPOLATION-CUBIC)
(let ((nfilename (string-append "a" filename)))
(gimp-file-save RUN-NONINTERACTIVE image drawable nfilename nfilename))
(gimp-image-delete image))
(set! filelist (cdr filelist)))))

By referring to the GIMP procedure and plugins browser and a Scheme tutorial, it is possible to customize the above script as required.

References:

GIMP Batch Mode

Basic Scheme Tutorial

How to write a BPEL extension for WSO2 BPS 1.1.0 and Apache ODE

You may always wanted to write your own BPEL activity to handle your scenario. This article will go through step by step process to implement a simple BPEL extension activity for WSO2 BPS and Apache ODE.

WSO2 Business Process Server (BPS) is an easy-to-use open source business process server that executes business processes written using the WS-BPEL standard. It is powered by Apache ODE (open source BPEL engine) and provides a complete Web-based graphical console to deploy, manage and view processes in addition to managing and viewing process instances.

Implementation of Extension Bundle

Create a class by implementing one of the ExtensionOperation interfaces which are available at [1]. The run* method of this class should contain the implementation of the extension activity. You can find a sample implementation of this class at [2].

Then You have to create a class by implementing AbstractExtensionBundle interface. Within this class, the above implemented ExtensionOperation class should be registered. A sample implementation can be found at [3].

Configure WSO2 BPS

There are two methods to expose the extension classes to BPS.

• Creating a jar.
  
  Copy the jar to BPS_HOME/repository/components/lib directory.
  
• Creating an OSGI bundle
  
  Copy the bundle to BPS_HOME/repository/components/dropins directory.
  

Add the following configuration entry to the bps.xml file in BPS_HOME/conf directory. Repalce org.wso2.bps.samples.extension by your extension class name.

Note: By default, the sample extension bundles shipped with WSO2 BPS are copied to BPS_HOME/repository/components/lib. You have to add the following configuration to get them registered in BPS.

<bps xmlns="http://wso2.org/bps/config">
...
<extensionBundles>
<runtimes>
<runtime>org.wso2.bps.samples.extension</runtime>
</runtimes>
</extensionBundles>
...
</bps>

Now, restart WSO2 BPS sever, and you are ready to use the new extension in your BPEL.

The process is almost the same for Apache ODE. But there is a separate configuration file to register the extension. Please refer ODE extensions documentation for more details.

Using the Extension activity in your BPEL

The extension must be declared before, it is used.

<bpel:process...>

<bpel:extensions>
<bpel:extension namespace="#extension-namespace#" 
                        mustUnderstand="yes|no"/>
</bpel:extensions>

...
</bpel:process>

If the mustUnderstand attribute is set to yes, then the extension should be registered in BPS server in order to deploy the BPEL process. Otherwise, it will throws an error at the compilation stage of the process. If the mustUnderstand attribute is set to no, then the BPEL process will be deployed without checking whether there is an extension registered in the server.

Using the activity. According to the sample anyElementQName should be equal to b4ptest

<extensionActivity>
<anyElementQName standard-attributes>
standard-elements
</anyElementQName>
</extensionActivity>

You can find a sample BPEL process at TestExtensionActivity.zip

References:

[1] - extension

[2] - B4PExtensionOperation.java

[3] - B4PExtensionBundle.java