Engwar

If you’ve not already heard the term (gasp!) or don’t have an idea about cloud computing you can look no further than the excellent, short presentation titled “Cloud Computing – Why IT matters” by Simon Wardley. Also, read a great paper about the subject “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing” [PDF].

Usually in technically adept circles you can hear virtualization being used more often than the term cloud computing, the technology that enable computers to evaporate into small H₂O particles and form clouds. Virtualization tools have been there for a while. It was, IMHO, got popular after Amazon slapped a Web services interface in front of Xen and said, try using this interface to start/stop and manage virtual machines. Having a separate service for persistent storage, again, is a brilliant marketing move. With big investments (such as Intel investing in Joyent) one can guarantee that the cloud space will get cloudier as time progress. This might make projects such as Simple Cloud more attractive.

Adoption rates for cloud computing is going to increase among the big guys. As a survey done by Forrester tells “one out of four large companies plan to use an external provider soon, or have already employed one”. When people are seriously considering moving to cloud platforms, you have to make sure that all the application programs are ready to be run on a virtualized environment. Specially SOA middleware products that the company is using should be compatible and must be able to take advantage of the services provided.

One advantage of moving to cloud computing is the ability to add/remove resources as and when it’s required. If your applications, or middleware products that you’re using is incapable of getting advantage of this elasticity (autoscaling to the inner techie in you) there’s no point, or no value gained by putting your stuff in the cloud. It’s one reason why WSO2 has “cloud enabled” all of the products line. Not only you can host all your services in the cloud using WSO2 middleware products, you can download pre-built images for VMware and KVM to run inside your private virtualized infrastructure. Give it a whirl and see!

Recently I built WSO2 Carbon. Here’s how I did it with some help from the carbon mailing list Do stick to the same build order. I did this on an Ubuntu machine. If you happen to see maven complaining about running out of memory just do,

$ export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m"

First step, build Axis2 1.4.1 from the custom branch

$ svn co http://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/branches/axis2/v1.4.1 axis2-1.4.1-branch

Next find the revision of the branch,

$ cd axis2-1.4.1-branch
$ svn info
Path: .
URL: http://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/branches/axis2/v1.4.1
Repository Root: http://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2
Repository UUID: a5903396-d722-0410-b921-86c7d4935375
Revision: 32422
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: amila
Last Changed Rev: 30518
Last Changed Date: 2009-02-06 10:39:03 +0530 (Fri, 06 Feb 2009)

Revision 30518 have an inconsistency in modules/addressing/pom.xml where the addressing artefact ID is wrong. You have to get this patch and apply it. Download, save it somewhere and do the following to apply the patch.

$ cd modules/addressing
$ patch -p0 < /home/chintana/addressing-pom.patch
$ cd ../..

Now you're at the Axis2 root level. Before building at the root level you have to build two plugins,

$ cd modules/tool/axis2-mar-maven-plugin
$ mvn clean install
$ cd ../axis2-aar-maven-plugin/
$ mvn clean install
$ cd ../../..

Back at the root level, now you can build the project,

$ mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true

Next step is to build Rampart from the custom branch,

$ svn co http://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/branches/rampart/1.4.wso2 rampart-custom
$ cd rampart-custom
$ mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true

Build Sandesha from the custom branch,

$ svn co http://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/branches/sandesha2/1.4.wso2 sandesha-custom
$ cd sandesha-custom
$ mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true

Next up is Savan, again from a custom branch,

$ svn co https://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/branches/savan/1.0wso2v1 savan-custom
$ cd savan-custom
$ mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true

Now all the prerequisites are complete for the Carbon platform. Let's go ahead and build Carbon. It has 3 parts. carbon-orbit, carbon and carbon-components (for carbon I had to change the addressing.version property in root level pom.xml to 1.4.1),

$ svn co http://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/trunk/carbon-orbit
$ cd carbon-orbit
$ mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true
$ cd ..
$ svn co http://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/trunk/carbon
$ cd carbon
$ mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true
$ cd ..
$ svn co http://svn.wso2.org/repos/wso2/trunk/carbon-components
$ mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true

All righty! After this you can go ahead and build other products which are designed on top of Carbon such as WSO2 WSAS, WSO2 ESB etc...