The title of this post is verbose enough about the feelings I have regarding the naming of this library. It's as if WSO2 took a page from Microsoft's book regarding names. What's next? A Home Edition? Maybe throw in Professional, Business and Ultimate versions too for good measure.

Don't take me wrong, I have no special feelings towards names themselves, it's just how difficult it makes to search for people working on the same things and facing the same problems. What do I Google for? WSO2? WSF? PHP? Any combination of these? It's only made worse by these guys developing frameworks in several platforms, which means I end up finding completely unrelated results from a different implementation, in a different technology.

But, naming rants aside, I thought it would be a good idea to share my experience with getting this library up and running on PHP. I came across this library when converting Apache Stonehenge's web application to use Turmeric's instances of Stonehenge's web services, and it gave me quite some headaches. For this reason, and so that other people in the future don't have to go through the same painful experiences, I decided to write this blog post. Keep reading if I got your attention...

First and foremost, I should warn that I'm also gonna write the Linux walkthrough and it does expect you to have some basic Linux knowledge. Nothing too advanced, you just need to know your way around a Linux system in a command line. If you meet this criterion, this walkthrough should be a walk in the park (no pun intended there).

Setting up the library

To begin with, you must download the WSF PHP library sources. You should be able to find it here somewhere. At the time of writing, the latest version is 2.1.0. Make sure you download the sources. Sadly, the binaries only include DLL's for the Windows installation, which means that us, Linux users, must compile our own binaries by hand. No biggie though, it's easier than it sounds.

After you've downloaded the library, the next thing you should do is "cd" into the directory. Then, normally you'd just do ./configure followed by a make and make install, but there's a caveat: it's VERY recommended that you specify a prefix when you do ./configure. The prefix will tell WSO2 where to place the binaries after you compile and "install", and this is extremely useful for WSF as you'll need a clean directory featuring only the binary files of this library. You'll understand why in a minute.

In sum, you should do:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/bin/apache2/php/wsf-php/
 make
 [sudo] make install

In my example you'll see that I'm telling "make" to install the library in /usr/local/bin/apache2/php/wsf-php/ and in the last step I've also accounted for those of you who, like me, use Ubuntu. If you use Ubuntu, make sure you add the sudo before the make install command (without brackets).

Troubleshooting: If you installed PHP through Ubuntu's packages, it is possible that everything went fine at this point. If it did (i.e. if you got no errors in neither of the stages) then excellent. Move on. Skip this section. If, on the other hand, you got an error about a missing php-config, then you need to specify the path to this binary in the ./configure step. First you should know where your PHP installation lies (and you're entirely on your own for this one) and once you know where it is, your php-config binary is inside <path_to_php>/bin/. Once you figured out where that is, you should go back to those three steps above, except your ./configure should look like:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/bin/apache2/php/wsf-php/ --with-php-config=<path_to_php>/bin/php-config

After this, don't forget of course, to do the make and make install steps.

With that done, you should now have the compiled library in /usr/local/bin/apache2/php/wsf/ (or in whichever folder you specified as prefix). You also want to have a look at the final lines of the "make install" step and look for a reference to a wsf.so file. That's THE library that PHP will load and you'll need to know exactly where it is. In my case, the library sits in /usr/local/bin/apache2/php/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/wsf.so . My guess is that the make install step is smart enough to put it in the equivalent folder inside your PHP's installation. Anyhow, copy this directory.

The next step involves editing your php.ini file. Again, you should know where this is. After you found it, add the following lines to it:

extension=/usr/local/bin/apache2/php/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/wsf.so
wsf.home="/usr/local/bin/apache2/php/wsf-php/"

From that you can see that I put the path to the .so file as an extension that PHP must load, and I specified an entry called "wsf.home" that will tell WSF where its "auxiliary" files are. This is the path you used as the prefix during the compiling process. These are the two most essential parameters that need to be configured to get WSF up and running, there's more but I'm aiming at the quickest way possible to get it running, with as little configuration as possible.

After you've added those lines, you should restart your Apache et voilà! Your PHP installation should now have loaded the WSF library. If you want to be sure that everything is up and running, you can check the contents of /tmp/wsf_php_server.log . If everything went well, this log should have no errors.

Creating a client and using it

Now comes another tricky part. Great, now your library is up and running, but how do you use it?

I'm gonna provide another quick and simple explanation of how to get a client up and running for an existing service. This assumes, of course, that you already have a service running somewhere which provides you with a WSDL file and SOAP ports that you can invoke.

Provided you have that, you need to copy a folder in the WSF sources to somewhere safe and accessible by PHP (by accessible, I mean, PHP/Apache should have at least read and execute permissions). The folder you need is <WSF_sources>/scripts/. Copy it somewhere you know it won't get deleted by an overzealous system administrator and keep it accessible. I would keep it out of public access via Apache but that's entirely up to you. It's the next step that is important.

Now that you copied this folder (and all its contents) to somewhere safe, you need to go back to your php.ini and add the folder to its include_path definition. In my case, I just uncommented the already existing line and added my scripts folder to it. In the end it looked like:

include_path = ".:/php/includes:/usr/local/bin/apache2/php/scripts/"

After you've added/uncommented this line, be sure to restart Apache once more. This line will just tell PHP where it can find scripts that WSF will need whenever you're using its libraries.

With that out of the way, the next step consists of creating a PHP classmap of all the operations and types you have in your WSDL file. My advice is that you obtain the WSDL file in advance and store it somewhere in your hard-drive. After you've done this, just go to the scripts folder and do:

php wsdl2php.php <path_to_your_wsdl_file>

It can happen at this step that Linux will tell you it can't find PHP. If that's the case, instead of starting off with just "php", use the full path instead.

By doing this step, you'll see a bunch of PHP code scrolling through your console. If that was the case, repeat the command and redirect the output to a file, e.g. > somefile.php.

This somefile.php is now your client. It includes a PHP class for every type in your WSDL and an action for every SOAP port. It also includes, at the very end, a sample of how you'd invoke every action. By looking at that you can probably get a good idea of how WSF works, and that's pretty much it. I assume that if you're messing around with PHP, you do have enough knowledge to get rid of these sample invokations and just use this file as something you import and use in your PHP application. That's not going to be covered in this tutorial.

If you do have questions or ran into trouble while following these steps, please do leave me a comment and I'll try to answer as soon as possible. I hope this has somehow helped you, reader. I know I wish I had found something like this post when I first started messing around with WSF!

Till the next post!

It's been a while since I posted something on this blog, partly due to my laziness, but also due to a chronic lack of time and patience to come home after an intellectually intense day of work and still have the peace of mind to gather my thoughts and put them in words. Today was, luckily, one of those days. Not because it was a particularly easy day at work (reengineering someone else's code with little to non-existing documentation is never an easy job) but perhaps the intense gym session loosed my brains just enough for organized and coherent thought to just happen. In any case, I digress.

This post has three main themes. I will be talking about a platform for SOA applications called Turmeric (funny name, I know. I'm using for SOA the same I use in my lentil soup), open-source in general and finally, the Apache Software Foundation and some recent events I've been involved in.

I shall begin with Turmeric SOA. Turmeric SOA, despite the strange choice of name, is actually an industry grade platform for web services. Why is it industry grade, you ask? Is it because the developers so claim? Not really. The industry grade designation is actually made by me - the project (and its developers) do not claim anything about it being industry ready or anything of that kind. I should mention, however, that Turmeric SOA is the open-source version of the platform that powers eBay. Yes, you read that right, THE eBay. In my book, if a platform handles the millions of customers all over the world that eBay does, that platform is pretty much as industry-grade as it gets these days.

Why am I talking about Turmeric SOA? Why am I even involved in Turmeric SOA?

It's very simple really and it all points back to my work as a Ph.D. student at the Delft University of Technology. My research, in broad terms consists of analyzing and coming up with new ways of helping the maintenance, reengineering and testing of Service Oriented Architectures. In this description, I've cleverly omitted the keyword that defines my research, mostly because it's a vague buzzword that means different things to different people (in case you're wondering, the word is multi-tenancy). In any case, my research involving SOA only makes sense if I have a software system on which I can investigate and demonstrate my claims and this is where it all gets hairy.

The fact is that for most companies, SOA simply means exposing some of their data through an API built on top of SOAP or REST, et voilà. All of a sudden they can claim that they are a company of the future because they have a SOA system. This, however, couldn't be farther from what an actual SOA system should be. We can even take the etymological angle and look at what SOA means: Service Oriented Architecture. I've emphasized the word "architecture" as I believe that is the keyword in the SOA acronym. Your SOA system should be built using an architectural style consistent with that of services that communicate with each other. It should be oriented towards/based on services, and not a monolithic blob with one tiny service gateway that allows me to query some data, even if that data is provided in a platform-agnostic manner. To people who have such monolithic SOA-wannabe systems, I ask: can I slice part of your software and place it elsewhere in the world with an Internet connection on both ends? If I can't, what if your user-base or your business grow to a point where one server no longer cuts it? What do you do then? Keep buying bigger motherboards with more CPU and RAM sockets?

Let's get real here. Your software system is service-oriented if I can grab all the pieces that compose it and spread it all over the world. The only thing I should have to tell the software system is: "you have service A deployed at this endpoint, service B at this other endpoint, etc etc" and then it would automagically just work, regardless of whether the services are running in the same application server or in each other's antipodes in completely opposite timezones.

So why am I bringing this up? Well, as it stands it's difficult enough to find open-source systems that are truly built around a service-oriented architecture. For most of these services, SOA is an afterthought. It's something those open-source ERP developers woke up one day and thought "hey, wouldn't it be cool if our ERP had some SOA features?" - and alas, the result is invariably slamming some poorly engineered JAXWS or Axis2 solution on top of already existing business logic and inevitably making a mess of a perfectly fine (albeit, poorly scaling) software system.

From my own experience, this is the summary of most open-source ERP systems out there that claim to have some kind of SOA functionality.

This doesn't cut it for us. This is not what the SOA paradigm truly stands for and these systems are ultimately useless for my research. There's only one web service! How the hell is it supposed to communicate with anything? Its business logic is ultimately still relying on local method calls.

Then out of this hell comes another frightening fact. Even the web service platforms out there are useless on their own. I was chatting with a friend of mine - who's not a computer scientist - the other day, and I was struggling to explain to her what exactly my problem was without using terms such as JAXWS, Turmeric, web services or SOA. I think I came up with a clear laymen explanation involving the process of building a car. So, my problem right now is that I need a very specific type of car, say, one that is rocket propelled. There are, of course, brands out there that have rocket propelled cars but there's no way on Earth that these guys are gonna let me even LOOK at their car, set aside open the hood and disassemble its engine. Yet, my research consists of analyzing the problems and challenges of maintaining a rocket propelled car. But I have no car, and no means to get one. This is a pretty big inconvenience. Not even me promising this car brand that I won't build a competitor car, or destroy their car will convince them to let me pop the hood - and so, Houston, we have a problem.

The solution to this problem is seemingly simple. I can just build my own rocket propelled car and hope for the best. But then we run into a more essential problem: I'm not a car maker, nor does my department pay me to make cars. Also, if by the end of my Ph.D. I've only built a rocket propelled car, they're not gonna be happy.

I could also cut some corners and build a mockup of a rocket propelled car. Sure, maybe it doesn't have a gearbox and the steering wheel is made of cardboard, but hey! It's a rocket propelled car! This would be swell, if it wasn't for the fact that even the free tools I can get out there to make cars are pretty... well... horrible. Stepping back out of the metaphor world, the problem is that the technologies available allow me to build simple web services. I can just grab Java's Metro project (aka JAXWS) and very easily deploy a web service, but that's just what it is. A web service, accessible via SOAP, amidst nothingness. There's nothing I can query to know that this service is there, there's no platform managing this service and telling me that it has this many services and that this particular one is one of them, there's no statistics or runtime information being kept on this service, there's basically... nothing. Just a Java class with a "WebService" sticker on it.

These tools make it difficult to build something that even resembles a real world SOA system (i.e. a rocket propelled car). They're the tiniest building blocks that you can think of. The sand in the car's windshield or the iron ore in the chassis' stainless steel. Sure, I can melt the sand, add some caustic soda and fashion my own windshield out of it. I can melt the iron ore and through some process I don't even know, make steel. But how long is this going to take me? And will the final result be a faithful representation of what actual companies in this line of work have made? Or just a silly toy example that doesn't fully represent the pains and benefits of such a system?

That's where Turmeric comes in. My first impression when I started using Turmeric was that of confusion. I thought to myself "well, that's another platform with an awful lot of features that no one's ever going to use", but I was wrong. Over time, with more thoroughly exploring this platform, it became clear that perhaps every single feature in Turmeric really stemmed from a real world use case, most likely from eBay. All those features, if you really think about it, you'll end up realizing "oh yeah, they probably use this to achieve X and Y". In other words, even if we don't have the rocket propelled car, we have the exact tools that we need to build one. Knowing that if the toolset includes a door-shaped mould, it probably means that our car should have at least one door - for which other reason would those guys have built such a tool if they hadn't built a door for their car before?

This makes Turmeric a very good candidate to be used as the tooling for my research. But Turmeric isn't, in my point of view, a very good candidate anymore. It's evolved from that into an excellent candidate at that! Now it's the time when I really have to shine a light on all the guys behind the task of open-sourcing eBay's platform. Those guys form a small community of people who usually hang around #turmeric-dev at irc.freenode.net and who just happen to be extremely friendly and helpful. Every time I hit a road bump with Turmeric, these guys go out of their ways to help me achieve the things I'm trying to achieve and I think that's a lot more than I could have ever asked for.

Quickly moving to the topic of open-source, since Turmeric SOA is actually an open-source project, this made me ever so fond of open-source stuff. It's really nice to see all these people dedicated in making such a tremendous contribution that is open-sourcing a platform from eBay to the good of the community. I love that. I love being able to - should I need - download a relational database management system from Apache without having to pay for it. I love seeing projects like Ubuntu flourish, showing companies that even software is all about the people it's built to and with a little help, even an open-source can kick big corporations in their royal butts.

All this to say that I've learned a whole lot over the last few days. Amongst the things I've learned is for example, git. The cool kids' versioning system. As Turmeric nowadays relies on Git for its version management, I thought now would be a good time to learn it and see what advantages it brings over SVN - and boy, does it leave SVN in its rear view mirror! I've grown so much accustomed to it that I've started moving my projects to Git as well and I've been trying to influence other people around me to use it (Andy, if you're reading this, wink wink, nudge nudge ). The saddest part of it all is that, in my opinion, you don't really fully understand the advantages it brings until you really give it a try with real source code that you must maintain in collaboration with other people.

Going on a bit of a tangent, Git (and open-source) has also enabled me to propose some enhancements to David Carver's (Turmeric SOA's top man) IRC bot that idles around #turmeric-dev - all via the clever features of Github, forking and pull requesting.

To finalize, the Apache Software Foundation. I'm gonna make it short and sweet. As of a couple of days ago, my fellow open-sourcers at Apache Derby decided to vote me to become a PMC (Program Management Committee) member for the Apache DB project. I have, of course, accepted and it is a post I will do my best to honor and live up to. I started off as a Google Summer of Code student at Apache Derby, then got promoted to committership, this year I had the privilege to mentor Siddharth Srivastava and now I'm becoming a PMC member. Life's good.

It's late now, time for sleep. If you've read it all the way down here, thank you! You're brave!

Good night!

We all know the folks at Adobe are some really nice people and that Steve Jobs was just being a bastard by not allowing Flash on the iPhone. But as it turns out, whilst Apple is too restrictive as to what it allows on their AppStore and their iDevices, Adobe on the other hand is too permissive and they might have just crossed a line.

Now, I understand that companies are all just trying to make money but if you attempt to install the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader and you're using Firefox, you'll be asked to install a Firefox extension to manage the download. While I typically try to avoid these downloaders (mostly because they're unnecessary and due to the fact that I don't feel comfortable with a company that thinks they're too important to give me a direct HTTP link), I was in a rush and I couldn't find a direct link on the page I was taken to. Considering this, I just thought "how bad can it be?" and went ahead.

What was not my surprise when I saw the following, without ANY user input at all:

Yep, what you see there is Adobe's downloader which has just installed McAfee Security Scan Plus. Without prompting me about it AT ALL. I was pretty annoyed with this situation because if this isn't the definition of ad/spyware, then I don't know what is. I just thought I'd write this as I'm not usually very happy with companies who think it's OK to install software on my computer without my consent. It's not OK. Adobe, you're the one McAfee should be protecting me from.

If you need a way to store your files in a manner that they are always accessible everywhere, then Dropbox is for you. In case you haven't yet heard about this service, then know that Dropbox offers you 2Gb for free to store whichever files you like. The guys at Dropbox also have a software that integrates nicely with Windows and Mac OS and you can even access the files from your iPhone or Android powered phone.

You might think that 2Gb are rather meager and you are right, that's nothing these days. This is why Dropbox has an awesome referral program that will allow you to go up to 10Gb just by referring friends! That's right, 10Gb for free just by referring Dropbox to a few friends.

Read on to find out more!

If you are up for it, Dropbox also offers paid plans where you can pay $9.99 a month for 50Gb of storage or you can go the extra mile and pay $19.99 for the 100Gb service. Still, if this is a little too extreme for you, register an account (with my referral, obviously ) and start spamming referring friends with your link!

Well, truth to be told this had to happen at some point. According to the good folks at Engadget, T-Mobile has most probably lost the data of their customers' Sidekick phones. The T-Mobile Sidekick is a device that relies heavily on cloud-computing and simple things such as looking up contacts or reading old text messages are done through servers in the cloud (that is to say, in the Internet). So if these servers fail for some reason, or more extremely (like it happened) lose all the data they contain, then the end user is pretty much screwed.

I hope for the sake of the costumers that the data isn't just lost; I would have also hoped that T-Mobile had off-site, offline backups of all this stuff but that clearly does not seem to be the case. It is also up to our imagination whom to blame for this. Of course that for all the people affected by this problem, T-Mobile will be the one to blame, but whose fault was it in the end? Is it a bug in the servers? Will it happen again? Has it been patched?

Doesn't really matter now but here's the morale of the story: ALWAYS keep backups of your data.

Here they are! The (supposed) first screenshots of what is to become Google's Operating System. The credibility and plausibility of those screenshots is actually flaky, but it's the best we have at the moment. Whether they are photoshopped or the real thing, time will tell.

The blog the images were taken from: here.

[via Engadget]

Update: The blog is a lie! Like I suspected, the leaked screenshots are actually fake. It didn't look so bad though!

Just a few hours ago Google has announced it will be entering the operating system market. The contestant? Google Chrome OS.

Google's goals seem to be speed and simplicity, although it remains unclear where they want to go with this. They go as far as stating that if you spend most of your time on the web, then Chrome OS is for you but this is all still too blurry. Will this be an actual operating system that lives outside the browser? Or is this some sort of mock-up of an operating system that you get in your browser? If it is the first, then I have a hard time finding true utility for it - a computer that can only browse the net? *Skepticism alert*

The time frame? Second half of 2010. Hit up the links below for more info:

CNET

PCWORLD

YAY!

Christopher Dawnson over at ZDNet has announced the end of the Ubuntu vs. Windows war, the world is safe again!

Till the next time!

WAIT! Hold it!

What the heck?! Wasn't ZDNet supposed to be a reliable source of information regarding technology? So what are these shenanigans about his 17 year old saying that they're the same? I'll tell you what it is: it is the most bold statement I've heard all year, and also the most idiotic one. So just because a 17 year old says that they're the same, 6 billion people will just agree and this fact will just be set in stone? Bullshit.

Windows and Linux are different; it's about time people realize that. I absolutely need both so is this proof enough that they are ultimately different?

Christopher says: "Their underlying architectures are quite a bit different, Gnome looks different than the 7 UI, etc.". The underlying architectures are quite a bit different, Gnome looks different than 7 does, but apart from that, which by the way is everything that effing matters in an Operating System, they're pretty much the same.

I have a Hyundai Getz, my neighbour has a Ferrari, but apart from the engine and the chassis they're pretty much the same. They both have wheels! A whole set of four! So they must be the same...

Come on guys... get serious.

It might be old news for some, but I am sure that not everyone is aware of this yet.

The good folks at the iPhone Dev Team did it again and after some days that just seemed too long, they released the new tool called redsn0w. This tool is meant to jailbreak the iPhone 3G only, and only with the firmware 3.0 - jailbreak for the 3GS still hasn't been released but since the flaw seems to exist in the 3G, it should only be a matter of days (and of the Dev Team getting their hands on a 3GS - feel free to chip in) until the jailbreak is released.

The process is pretty simple, just update to 3.0 normally through iTunes and when that's done, search for the correct IPSW in the following folder (if you're using Vista or 7):
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPhone Software Updates
(For XP, search around the Application Data folders under Documents and Settings)

When you have this file, just feed it to redsn0w and follow the steps. In under 5 minutes you should be running a jailbroken 3.0.

After this is done, if you also want to operator-unlock your phone, you'll need ultrasn0w. This is the replacement for the long-lived yellowsn0w. In case you weren't aware of this fact, the new baseband has a hole again, which allows for it to be hacked. This way, we can all use different operator SIM cards without a problem.

To install ultrasn0w, you simply need to add the repo http://repo666.ultrasn0w.com and then search and install the application ultrasn0w on Cydia. Reboot your phone, and you're done. It really is THAT easy!

So what are you waiting for? Go for it!

Howdy readers,

Today I bring you one of the long time mysteries for me. Why in heavens does Mozilla insist on making different menus for Firefox and Thunderbird depending on whether you're using it on Linux or Windows? Seriously, I just can't figure out the reason for this... the Options menu sits in the Tools toolbar in Windows, whereas in the Linux version, it goes under Edit. But WHY?!

'Till the next time!