Manjula's Blog

Good bye ! WSO2

2009-07-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

Today is my last day at WSO2. I will be leaving to US for my higher studies in August.
I joined WSO2 in September 2006. I did all my work in WSO2 C platform. I worked mainly on Axis2/c, Rampart/C , Sandesha2/C Apache projects. Adding WS-Policy, WS-Security Policy support C stack, rewriting the Axis2/C MTOM support, Fixing bugs and interop issues in Sandesha2/C and contributing to Ramaprt/C on building and processing security header are some of the major contributions I have done. I also worked on some customer projects and involved in some new stuff during my last few weeks. I learned a lot involving in these work.

WSO2 is a great place to work. During my three year stay I never felt it is boring to come to the office. Sometimes when people are doing jobs they are eagerly waiting for clock to become 5pm or the day to be Friday. But honestly speaking during my stay I never felt that. I always felt that time had gone very fast when I was in WSO2. Whenever you feel that time is going very fast that means you are involved in some interesting work or you are not bored with what you are doing. I always felt that hours, days , weeks and months are rushing when I was in WSO2.

I should thank Dr Sanjiva Weerawarna for the opportunity provided for me. His encouragements, guidance, leadership is really great. I am getting the chance to do higher studies mainly because of Dr. Sanjiva.

I should also thank Samisa. I really like to work under his guidance. I learned lots of technical stuff and non technical stuff from him.

Almost all the WSO2 colleagues are really helpful and friendly. Thank you every one for the support and kindness you showed to me during my tenure at WSO2.

I wish WSO2 very best in coming years.

We have done it! Come and learn from us

2009-05-20T03:59:00.000-07:00

Our great army completely eliminated LTTE terrorism from our mother land. Five years back it was a task people thought that we were never going to achieve. Five years back if you ask ten people, can we beat LTTE from the war eight would say no you couldn't. But today it again proved that what majority thought was wrong. During the 2005 presidential election campaign I remember how certain media act on behalf of some candidates whose opinion was that LTTE cannot be eliminated from a war.

There are lots of things we can learn from this victory. For me the main thing is when there are right people in the right places there is nothing impossible. First of all we have elected the most suitable person who got the help from patriot people as our president. Then the president give the responsibility of this huge campaign to the most suitable military leaders. The right vision and the great plan gave the invaluable gift to the mother land.

The other thing is the current president didn't win the election by a big margin compared to some other previous leaders. But he did the task that all the others failed to do. This tells that people you trust most the time are not the real champions. It is some other who you may not think will become the man of the match.

Carbon and SOA platform

2009-03-03T08:23:00.000-08:00

Carbon 1.5.1 is out. This is a bug fix release of Carbon 1.5.0.
WSO2 Carbon provides all the features a SOA platform requires.A SOA platforms enables,

1. Creating Services
2. Connecting Services
3. Composing Services
4. Governing Services.

WSO2 Carbon enable all these very smoothly.

Component based SOA - WSO2 Carbon

2009-02-11T08:10:00.000-08:00

WSO2 Carbon is the new way of creating your SOA Middleware. It contains everything you want to build your Middleware. With WSO2 Carbon,

1 You can use minimal set of features you want.
2.Later you can easily extend the functionality with minimal effort.
3.You can add your own functionality
4. You can add other third party functionality

For more details see paul's this blog post.

Freedom

2009-02-04T03:18:00.000-08:00

An Open Source SOA case study

2008-11-19T07:31:00.001-08:00

Open source software is a nice solution for economic slow down. You don't need to spent bulk amount of money for commercial license. With open source software we can achieve the same quality and some times more features. Case study in WSO2 Oxygen Tank is a nice example of how WSO2 products provide real SOA value to your business.

RESTful PHP Web Services

2008-10-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

Samisa has written a book on RESTful PHP Web Services. Samisa was the chief architect behind WSO2 WSF/PHP. So this book is collection of invaluable experiences on PHP Web Services.

Axis2/C with WS-Addressing Submission version.

2008-10-22T05:50:00.000-07:00

An Axis2/C client can send WS-Addressing submission version headers in the SOAP request. It is just adding a property to the axis2_options_t . Following code segment demonstrate that.

axutil_property_t *property = NULL;
property = axutil_property_create(env);
axutil_property_set_scope(property, env, AXIS2_SCOPE_APPLICATION);
axutil_property_set_value(property, env,AXIS2_WSA_NAMESPACE_SUBMISSION);
axis2_options_set_property(options, env, AXIS2_WSA_VERSION, property);

Three years for Axis2/C

2008-10-04T09:17:00.000-07:00

This blog post of Samisa shows the first commit to Apache Axis2/C. It is also 2 years for my work to Axis2/C. As my understanding Axis2/C enables many things in SOA world. Following are some key things.

1. It enables legacy systems written in C/C++ to be exposed as web services.
2. It allows you to write C/C++ clients to consume web services written in .NET , JAVA

So you may be thinking why we need Axis2/C, We can use gSOAP a very popular web services framework. But the real strength in Axis2/C is the WS-* support. See this article by Damitha for more details.

3. It opened the door for many scripting language users to enter the SOA world. Not only simple web services, but with a great quality of service with WS-* support. WSO2 WSF/PHP WSO2 WSF/RUBY are some great examples of this.

So for what else Axis2/C can be used ? For me it will be really useful when it comes to embedding. Because you can't use JAVA for embedding in many systems due to the high memory froot print. In that case C is the ideal and the solution. So do you want Web services embedded there ? So then why not trying Axis2/C ? Because it is written in C.

Finding Interoperability issues

2008-09-28T09:19:00.000-07:00

During last few weeks I was involved in doing interoperability testing of WSF/C stack with .NET WCF. Actually what I understood was most of the times interoperability testing fails due to small errors like namespace mismatching, wrong payload, and ect. Actually the problem is most of the WS frameworks including .NET does not clearly indicate the error in some occasions. This makes the interoperability tester's work really hard.

Following are tips we can follow when some thing went wrong during interoperability testing.

1.Check the errors and log messages from the WS- frameworks
- This helps some times but in some situations the exceptions are misleading
2.Always send the messages through a message capturing tool
3.Always check the payload of the SOAP message is according to the schema.
4.Check the namespaces of the message elements.
5.Check specially the WS-Addressing elements in the message
6.Compare same framework's client-server messages with interoperability testing messages.
7.If your client is not working try to interop with your own service.
8.If the error cannot be found then ask from those framework authors.

Axis2/C and Sandesha2/C

2008-09-20T02:30:00.000-07:00

Sandesha2/C is the Web services Reliable Messaging module for Axis2/C. Actually Sandesha2/C is the fist module written for Axis2/C. Due to the complexity of RM protocol stabilizing Sandesha2/C became very hard during the past 2 years. But Sandesha2/C did a great deal for Axis2/C. Because most of the bugs at code level as well as architectural level in Axis2/C were exposed because of Sandesha2/C.Even though there aren't much people using Sandesha2/C like Ramaprt/C in order to stabilize Axis2/c the contribution from Sandesha2/C is invaluable.

I with Damitha worked on Sandesha2/C for interop with .net. We added Reliable messaging policy support both 1.0 and 1.1. Most of the .net interop test cases are passed now. And Sandesha2/C is very very stable now. It also adds reliability to WSO2 WSF/PHP 2.0 . If you haven't try Web Services reliability with Sandesha2/c i think now it is the time.

Sending WS-Addressing reference Parameters with Axis2/C

2008-09-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

After fixing some bugs I was able to send WS-Addressing reference parameters from Axis2/C. Problem was in the receiving end where it just ignores the reference parameters. You can send reference parameters now targeting the endpoint address or something you want in the reply message.

/*First create the axiom_node,*/

axiom_node_t *ref_param = your_ref_param_node_creation_func(env);

/*To send a ref_param targeting the endpoint*/

axis2_endpoint_ref_add_ref_param(to_epr, env, ref_param);

/*To send a ref_param inside reply_to header */
axis2_endpoint_ref_add_ref_param(reply_to_epr, env, ref_param);

In the latter case you will see the ref_param in the reply as a top level addressing header.

WSO2 WSF/PHP 2.0 released

2008-09-12T23:30:00.000-07:00

Nandika has announced the release of WSO2 WSF/PHP 2.0. You can download the release from here. This is a very feature rich release. Following is the feature list.

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

1. Client API to consume Web services
* WSMessage class to handle message level options
* WSClient class with both one way and two way service invocation support
* Option of using functions in place of object oriented API with ws_request

2. Service API to provide Web services
* WSMessage class to handle message level options
* WSService class with support for both one way and two way operations
* Option of using functions in place of object oriented API with ws_reply

3. Attachments with MTOM
* Binary optimized
* Non-optimized (Base64 binary)

4. WS-Addressing
* Version 1.0
* Submission

5. WS-Security
* UsernameToken and Timestamp
* Encryption
* Signing
* WS-SecurityPolicy based configuration
* WS-Secure Conversation

6. WS-Reliable Messaging
* Single channel one way and two way reliable messaging

7. WSDL Generation for Server Side
* WSDL generation based on annotations and function signatures, and serving on ?wsdl or wsdl2 requests

8. WSDL mode support for both client and server side
* Write services and client based on a given WSDL
* WS-Addressing and WS-SecurityPolicy is supported in WSDL mode
* MTOM is now supported with WSDL mode

9. REST Support
* Expose a single service script both as SOAP and REST service

10. Provide easy to use classes for common services
* Consume some well known services such as Yahoo search and Flickr and Amazon services using predefined classes

11. wsdl2php.php script. This script can generate PHP classes for services and clients for a given WSDL to be used with WSDL Mode .

12. Data Services API
PHP Data Services API that enables exposing database queries as web services.

--------------------------------
Major Changes Since Last Release
================================
* Added PKCS12 Keystore Support
* Added Secure Conversation Support
* Added Replay Detection Support
* Contract First Web Services support for MTOM
* SWA ( Soap With Attachments ) Support added
* MTOM Attachment caching support added
* HTTP Chunking support added
* REST API Improved to support HTTP verbs GET,DELETE,PUT and POST
* New PHP Data Services Solution
* WS-RM 1.1 added
* Many Bug Fixes

Finding and resolving Axis2/C realted issues

2008-07-30T08:55:00.000-07:00

While working with Axis2/C and related projects for last couple years following are some steps to follow in order as a developer when you encounter something not working as expected..

1. Capture the messages using a tool like TCPMON and check.
2. Check the log and see whether there are log messages as errors.
3. If it crashes, run in the debug mode and check the back trace.
4. If the back trace is not giving enough information then debug the suspected code segments
5. Run through a memory profiling tool like valgrind or purify and check for following,
- Invalid frees
- Invalid Writes
- Invalid Reads

6. If you have to debug in a loop or in a threaded environment try putting additional printfs and log messages to capture the culprit.

7. If none of this help then get the support from some other developer or put a mail describing the problem to the mailing list

WSO2 WSF/RUBY 1.1.0 released

2008-07-23T08:42:00.000-07:00

WSF/Ruby is the Ruby language extension to WSO2 WSF/C. This enables you to consume/provide Web services both with REST and with the power of WS-* stack including WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Security, WS-Addressing and MTOM Attachments.

For more information, please visit project home page,
http://wso2.org/projects/wsf/ruby

You can download this release from http://wso2.org/downloads/wsf/ruby.

Yet again We are the Asian Champions

2008-07-06T11:01:00.000-07:00

We (Sri Lanka) won the Cricket Asia cup 2008. Remember we were the winners last time.We beat India by 100 runs in today's match to grab the trophy . After 39 years old Sanath Jayasooriya's marvelous innings I thought it is all over when Virendra Shewag was cruising along nicely. But the new find Ajantha Medins turned it over. He bowls off breaks, leg breaks, quickers and Indians are really helpless. At the end without bowling his complete 10 overs he grabbed 6 wickets for just 13 runs. It was absolutely an exhibition of spin bowling from young Mendis. Ajantha Mendis is a cricketer from my home town Moratuwa. So it makes me more happy. So after sometime we have something to cheer about!

Difficulties with MTOM Caching

2008-06-28T08:55:00.000-07:00

I am putting a great effort these days in order to get something working on MTOM caching stuff. I have completed most of the things in both sending and receiving ends.The main reason for the difficulties in this implementation is some of the limitations in Axis2/C http transport.First of all HTTP chunk transfer encoding is not working properly with Axis2/C. The main reason for MTOM caching support is prevent loading the entire attachment to the memory at once. So in that case when we send the attachment we need to send it as chunked. But Axis2/C transport is implemented in such a manner that it creates the whole sending buffer at once and copying the whole data to it. We can send this data as chunk but that is not what we need because we have loaded the whole data to memory.

So in the MTOM case I did following.

1. Defined a new type called axiom_mime_output_part. This will wrap a buffer or a file. In the case of file it will keep the file names and sizes.
2. when building the SOAP message with attachment instead of loading to the memory an array_list of these mime_output_parts are created.
3. In the transport we send each item in the array_list as chunks

I was able to get this to work with axis2_simple_http_server. But when I tried this with Apache it seems that Apache does not give any information to Axis2/C whether it is reading from a chunk stream or not. But for the newly implemented mime_parsing algorithm to work this detail is crucial. So I am now looking at a solution for this.

Today is Vesak Day

2008-05-18T22:05:00.000-07:00

Today is Vesak Full moon day. Today is the day lord Buddha's birth, enlightenment and death happened. Actually today is day a new teaching had started. There are lot we can learn from lord Buddha's teaching. You may be a student, a leader, a teacher, a parent, a child... or a normal human being there is lot you can learn from lord Buddha's teaching. Lord Buddha is great when it comes to describing something with real world examples. I have read many of them during the past years. Following is a simple but a generic truth about people which is explained in a nice manner which I read recently.

There are four types of clouds.

1. Clouds which thunder and lighting but do not give any rain.
2. Clouds which thunder and lighting and give rain.
3. Clouds which do not thunder or lightning but give rain.
4. Clouds which do not thunder or lighting and do not give any rain.

Similarly there are four types of People

1. People who shout but do not do anything as they shout.
2. People who shout and do as they shout.
3. People who do not shout but do lots of things.
4. People who do not shout and do not do anything.

Axis2/C 1.4 released

2008-05-10T08:17:00.000-07:00

Dinesh has announced the release of Axis2/C 1.4. The major change in this release is the change of default parser as Guththila. Guththila is a XML parser developed by Axis2/C developers which has advantages when using for SOAP. See this if you want to get an understanding of Axis2/C's performance when used with Guththila.

This release also has a changed on how Axis2/C httpd module deals with APR memory pools. In this release Axis2/C creating an APR local pool and it takes the ownership and deletes it when the request is over. We have introduced this because in a production environment to handle large requests this will be useful. But we still need to do a performance test on this.You are welcome to do a performance test between Axis2/C 1.4 and 1.3 when used with Apache2.

Axis2/C new articles

2008-05-04T09:52:00.000-07:00

I have written an article on Overcoming memory related issues in Axis2/C . This will give you some tips to solve some of the memory related issues in Axis2/C.

Recently there is a good article on Axis2/C performance. It is comparing Axis2/C with Axis2/Java for performance. And it also has a good comparison on the performance of Guththila XML parser vs libxml2.

WSF/PHP Demo site

2008-03-12T02:57:00.000-07:00

Dimuthu has announced the availability ofWSF/PHP Demo site. It really is nice peace of work. It shows all the capabilities of WSO2 Web services framework for PHP. Since WSF/PHP is becoming the framework for doing web services in PHP this demo site will be a huge guidance for most of the users.
You can post suggestions and possible improvements to the demo site via WSO2 WSF/PHP user mailing list wsf-php-user@wso2.org.

Axis2/C 1.3 released

2008-03-05T20:01:00.000-08:00

We have released Axis2/C 1.3 recently. Lot of important Jira issues are fixed in this release .This shows the enthusiasm of Axis2/C developers. Actually Axis2/C user community is growing rapidly. It can be sensed from the the mailing lists. The most important factor is that many people used it in production environments. And it is a proof of the stability and robustness of Axis2/C. I am pretty sure that 1.3 release will surely help those users who used it in their production environments and will attract new users.

Axis2/C can handle large attachments

2008-02-27T09:34:00.000-08:00

With great deal of hard work I was able to reduce the memory consumption in large attachments.Thanks Samisa and Dumindu for valuable ideas. Uthiyashankar helped a lot to fix some problems in Windows.For complete view of the problem and solution follow this. Even though the work is tough when ever I finished such work I feel a great deal of satisfaction. And I also see now there are lots of users for Axis2/C .It generates great amount of pleasure for whole Axis2/C team. And I am also happy that I was able to fix this issue and it is shipped with 1.3 release. I am also hoping to implement caching support for large attachments. If you have any suggestions on how to do that wait a second and be kind enough to put a comment.

Important things about WSF/PHP

2008-02-17T09:52:00.000-08:00

In this blog entry Dinesh is talking about 5 important things about WSF/PHP. They are,

1. Open source Apache license
2. WS-* suppoort
3 Attachment capability
4 REST support
5. Interoperability

I like to add another thing. That is the various types of distributions WSF/PHP supports. Select the most suitable distribution from WSF/PHP dpwnloads page.

Axis2/C, Handling large attachment with Apache2

2008-02-07T07:59:00.000-08:00

Dinesh has put a blog on the topic. Thanks Dinesh for that. Actually I am currently working on it. The main problem is why httpd does not release the memory after processing the request.
In Axis2/C MTOM implementation when a new buffer is read from the stream it reallocates the whole buffer for every read. Because of this string manipulation logic inside mime_parser seems bit simple. Now I am trying to manipulate the string without reallocating the whole buffer, instead keeping the buffers in an array. It seems really tough. Because string searching in two buffers seems really tricky. With a great deal of hard work I was able to send a 40M attachment using the new logic from simple_axis2_server.But httpd send only 39M. I am analyzing the problem. I noticed a huge gain in memory usage with the new logic. If you have any idea on improving this logic (inside axis2c/axiom/src/attachments/mime_parser.c) please let us know.

Good bye Buddhika!

2008-01-31T09:46:00.000-08:00

Today is Buddhika's last day at WSO2. Actually it is a really sad day for me. My friendship with him during the last 5 years was unforgettable. We shared all the happiness, sorrow , problems , loneliness with each other.

I met him in 2003 during our first year at department of computer science and Engineering. Both of us took the same subjects, we were in the same place when doing internship and were in the same group for our final year project. Funny thing was during our final year both of us were selected to the same companies for jobs. Finally we decided to choose WSO2.

Buddhika did a great job for WSF/PHP project. His contributions surely helped WSF/PHP to become a world class SOAP Engine for PHP.

Working with him is really funny, you never feel tired or boring. I also learned a lot from him related to technical matters and personal matters.

There is a saying ,
"DO A JOB YOU LOVE AND LOVE THE JOB YOU DO". I think reason for Buddhika's leaving may be the first part of that statement. I don't know.

Any way I wish him best of luck and a bright career at his new working place.

Amazon Online Shopping with Web Service Framework for PHP

2008-01-30T08:56:00.000-08:00

WSF/PHP is really powerful. Amazon online Web Services for PHP describes how you can consume Amazon web services with your own PHP aplication with far more ease

Change in my life

2008-01-29T08:38:00.000-08:00

For the first time in my life I have started an affair with a girl. I also hope this to be the last time. Last two months was really stressful. It is not a straightaway yes. I also see continuing with it also not an easy job due to various reasons not from my side but from her side. But I will try my best and it needs lots of patience, may be weeks may be months I don't know.

I also see some difference in my thinking style. Because before this incident when I was traveling from train or in my free time I was thinking about something related to my work. For an example it may be a bug in the code or some thing I don't understand. Trust me I was able to solve some of the problems as a result of that. But during the past few weeks on those situations my mind is going through this new experience. I will try to escape from this because I like my previous thinking style.

Hope time will change this, because it is the best solution for these types of situations.

What is more flexible ?

2008-01-28T08:56:00.000-08:00

Here is a Hello world Service with PHP SOAP extension , NuSOAP and WSF/PHP . Those are the 3 most popular PHP Web Services framework. So which is more flexible.

What is Missing in PHP SOAP Extension?

2008-01-24T07:08:00.000-08:00

PHP SOAP extension is good for simple web services. But to use the power of real web services in PHP WSF/PHP is the real solution. Limitations of PHP SOAP extension very well explained here.

Everything about PHP WebServices

2008-01-23T08:14:00.000-08:00

PHP WebServices are getting popular thanks to WSF/PHP. So if you want to know about any thing on PHP WebServices , this is the place.

Why We need a Timestamp in a SOAP message

2008-01-21T06:30:00.000-08:00

A common concern in message-oriented systems relates to the timeliness of data. If the data is too old, it may get thrown out. If two contradicting messages arrive, the related timestamps may be used to decide which message gets executed and which one is ignored. To handle the time-related issues that showed up in WS-Security the wsu:Timestamp element, along with a few helper elements, was defined.

By knowing the creation and expiration time, a receiver can decide if the data is new enough for its own use or if the data has become so stale that the message should be discarded. Following elements are used in a Timestamp.

wsu:Created: Contains the time that the message was created.
wsu:Expires: Set by a sender or intermediary, this identifies when the message expires.

Adding a timestamp to your SOAP message using Web Services framework for PHP is really easy.You only need to add following lines to your PHP script.

/*sec array is the array in which you specify security options*/

$sec_array = array("includeTimeStamp" => TRUE );

/*The valid time period of the message in seconds.*/
$sec_token = new WSSecurityToken(array("ttl" => 300));

WS-Addressing with WSF/PHP

2008-01-19T08:41:00.000-08:00

Web Services addressing is one of the fundamental specifications which drives Web Services platform. There are lot of reasons why you need Web Services Addressing. For a detailed description see this.

WSO2 WSF/PHP fully support WS-Addressing. It inherits this from Axis2/C Web Service engine. Adding Addressing support in WSF/PHP is really simple.

You only need to add following lines to your PHP script when you are invoking a Web Service.

Assuming some one want to set Addressing action and endpoint uri using addressing. Then first add the following.

$reqMessage = new WSMessage($requestPayloadString,
array( "to" => "http://localhost/samples/echo_service_addr.php",
"action" => "http://php.axis2.org/samples/echoString"));

Then enable WS-Addressing.

$client = new WSClient(array("useWSA" => TRUE));

Similarly you can set FaulTto, ReplyTo and other addressing parameters as well.

WSF/PHP interop with .net

2008-01-16T09:40:00.000-08:00

WSF/PHP has passed many interop testing. Specially with .net web services and Axis2 web services. Specially WSF/PHP security stuff and MTOM stuff are well tested in most of .net interop testing events. For more details on this see WSF/PHP Road Map.

Signing the SOAP message

2008-01-15T03:56:00.000-08:00

When sending SOAP messages to web services Integrity protection is crucial. That is the service invoker should be confident that his messages is not altered way through. The Problem is this useful facility does not offered by most of the PHP Web service frame works. WS02 WSF/PHP not only offers this facility but also in a really easy manner.

You need to add only the following lines to your web services client script to enable signature.

/*signers public key*/
$my_cert = ws_get_cert_from_file("location/of/the/key");

/*Telling the framework to sign the message body*/
$sec_array = array("sign"=>TRUE)

For more details on creating the PHP script see this .

WS-Policy support in WSF/PHP

2008-01-14T09:06:00.000-08:00

Web Services Policy is the standard way of publishing non functional requirements of a Web Service. For an example the only way of telling that a service needs all the incoming messages to it be signed is through Web Service Policy. WSO2 WSF/PHP is the only Web Services framework for PHP which suppoorts WS-Policy in an easy to use way.

You don't need to understand complex policy grammar. It is just PHP scripting. Follwing is an easy approach.

/*The Payload to be sent*/
$reqPayloadString = Hello World!

try {
/*The certificates need for security*/

/*Reciever's Public Key*/
$rec_cert = ws_get_cert_from_file("../keys/bob_cert.cert");

/*Sender's Private Key*/
$pvt_key = ws_get_key_from_file("../keys/alice_key.pem");

/*construction of Message using the endpoint Address*/
$reqMessage = new WSMessage($reqPayloadString,
array("to" => "http://localhost/samples/security/encryption/service.php",
"action" => "http://php.axis2.org/samples/echoString"));

/*The configurations need for security. Actually these are assertions found in Security Policy*/
$sec_array = array("encrypt" => TRUE,
"algorithmSuite" => "Basic256Rsa15",
"securityTokenReference" => "IssuerSerial");

/*construction of actual Policy object.*/
$policy = new WSPolicy(array("security" => $sec_array));
$sec_token = new WSSecurityToken(array("privateKey" => $pvt_key,
"receiverCertificate" => $rec_cert));

/*construction of WSClient to Send the message*/
$client = new WSClient(array("useWSA" => TRUE,
"policy" => $policy,
"securityToken" => $sec_token));

/*sending the message*/
$resMessage = $client->request($reqMessage);

printf("Response = %s \n", $resMessage->str);

If you have policy file instead of options , you just need to construct the policy object as follows.

$policy_xml = file_get_contents("policy.xml");
$policy = new WSPolicy($policy_xml);

So WS-Policy are now not complex things for PHP users willing to do Web Services.

Authenticating Users in PHP Web Services.

2008-01-13T07:05:00.000-08:00

User authentication is very important in Web services. Web Services Security Username token profile is the widely used standard used in Web Services for client authentication. WSO2 WSF/PHP provides Username token based authentication really easy. You may have a MYSQL based user details with their passwords. By just providing a callback function as following It is really easy to authenticate users before invoking the business logic.

/* The business logic */

function echoFunction($inMessage) {

$returnMessage = new WSMessage($inMessage->str);

return $returnMessage;
}

/*Password Callback function
function get_my_password_function($username)
{
//logic to get password from any source (ex: using mysql database
// etc)

}

$operations = array("echoString" => "echoFunction");
$actions = array("http://php.axis2.org/samples/echoString" => "echoString");
$sec_array = array("useUsernameToken" => TRUE);

$policy = new WSPolicy(array("security"=>$sec_array));
$sec_token = new WSSecurityToken(array("passwordCallback" => "get_my_password_function",
"passwordType" => "Digest"));

$svr = new WSService(array("operations" => $operations,
"actions" => $actions,
"policy" => $policy,
"securityToken" => $sec_token));

$svr->reply();

?>

For more clarification see WSF/PHP user manual

WSO2 Web Services Framework for PHP v1.2.0 Released

2008-01-07T07:37:00.000-08:00

Nandika has announced the release of WSO2 WSF/PHP v 1.2.0 . Actually if you see the feature list it is not only about sending a simple SOAP message to the other end. It is the only web services frame work in PHP which is capable of secure , Reliable Web services. And the only one capable of Attachments. This release have a very rich WSDL support. Even WS-Addressing and WS-Security Policy support through WSDL mode.

So Web services are not for developers any more. Little PHP script is sufficient now. Do you have a WSDL or location of a WSDL? Then why not try WSF/PHP ?

Different Work

2008-01-05T04:35:00.000-08:00

I am doing some different work these days. Actually it is regarding Axis2C-858. I am doing hours of testing with the help of Samisa.

I am also assigned to work on Axis2/C. I have been working on many projects after joining WSO2. I worked on WS-Security, WS-Security Policy, WS-Policy, WS-Reliable messaging, WS-client etc.

During the last 3 months I was debugging debugging and debugging to find many problems in Sandesha2/C. I think the issues I found in Sandesha2/c will surely help it to stabilize.

During first six month of 2007 I was coding , coding and coding in Neethi/C and Rampart/C.

Now I am testing, testing and testing hours. So different experiences!.

2007 - A success

2008-01-01T08:56:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of 2008 I just thought to write the first blog as a review about 2007. Actually 2007 was a great year. It is an year which ended up in great success after 2001. 2001 is an special year . Because it is the year in which I did my Advanced Level exam. That year was special because I can remember at the beginning of that year I was scoring around 40% for my Mathematics paper. But due to the hard work during that year I was able to get around 90% and at the examination got a distinction. It was really memorable.

2007 was great because I worked really hard during this year at WSO2 and that gave me tremendous experience for my carrier. I worked on lots of different projects with great pleasure and learned a lot. Actually I am really proud to be a member of WSO2 C team.

I was able to do great deal of repair work for my little house with the help of family members. Actually when I see my mother, father and sister living there comfortably than earlier it generates great amount of pleasure and satisfaction.

I got ADSL last week. So now I can blog frequently.