WSO2 Stratos - Open Source Cloud Computing Platform

Last week, 2^nd of June 2010 just to be exact; WSO2 announced a complete Platform-as-a-Service for both public and private clouds, named WSO2 Stratos.

WSO2 Stratos is our complete SOA middle-ware platform in the cloud. It is based on the award wining WSO2 Carbon platform and is available as a cloud-native runtime.

In the Alpha version, WSO2 Stratos offers the following products in the cloud:

Carbon in the Cloud

• Governance Registry (GREG)
• Identity Server (IS)
• Gadget Server (GS)
• Mashup Server (MS)
• Business Activity Monitor (BAM).

WSO2 Stratos is available as a downloadable version for those who are interested in having a private cloud within the enterprise. Or, you can just use it on the web! So what holding you back? just give it a try right now! :-)

Data visualization frameworks and Protovis

Recently, I was going through some data visualization frameworks as I work on our own visualization framework at WSO2. Initially, we aimed to develop a gadget framework which would make it easier for users to develop their own gadgets for WSO2 Business Activity Monitor (WSO2 BAM). However, now it has become a data visualization framework and almost ready for a beta release.

Among all other data visualization frameworks that I have come across; IMHO Axiis and Flare were the most interesting flex/flash based frameworks. Axiis is built upon Degrafa, and I spent some time messing around with it just to find it bit complicated. May be I was not keen enough to understand Axiis very well :P. And the fact is that my taste buds always prefer javascript over actionscript.

Protovis and flot are two javascript frameworks that I used recently for data visualization purposes. flot is a plotting library, to be more precise. Among those two frameworks we selected Protovis as our initial javascript visualization library to write js wrappers. Also, we used Raphael to write some special charts and controls.

I personally like love Protovis and Raphael - the most amazing javascript visualization libraries.

I am not going to write much about the WSO2 Visualization Framework or AKA WSO2vis in this post. Just hold it there for a detailed post about WSO2vis in the very near future. :-) It is always the best to try things out by yourselves. Start from checking out the protovis column chart I embedded here.

new pv.Panel()
    .width(150)
    .height(150)
  .add(pv.Bar)
    .data([1, 1.2, 1.7, 1.5, .7])
    .bottom(0)
    .width(20)
    .height(function(d) d * 80)
    .left(function() this.index * 25)
  .root.render();

USB Guitar for Frets on Fire

I have been a fan of Frets on Fire for quite sometime now but I had enough time playing it with my laptop's Keyboard. So I bought a toy guitar and a USB Keyboard and I just had to wire the guitar's push buttons correctly to the Keyboard's tiny (not so tiny though) circuit board so that it invokes key presses.

Unfortunately, I noticed that the toy guitar I bought does not really work the way I want it to. Therefore, I might end up with something similar to this. Just need to find a glove and some conductors. ;-)








[What's New]

iDisplay Media App

These are some photos of a new Media application developed on iDisplay.

It demonstrates the capability of having live and natural interactions between the real world and the virtual world.

A virtual face of a person is rendered inside a defined area by a plastic frame and that virtual face is looking at the colored pluck placed on the display. (Inspired by a Siftables demo).






[ What's New ]

Mahamevnawa TV

There is a "Medin Poya Day"  Live Web Cast (Sinhala) from "Amawatura Mahamevnawa Asapuwa", Malambe, Sri Lanka.

If you have a low bandwidth connection, there is an audio only (Sinhala) version as well.

Grab something meaningful to your life today. :-)