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Welcome to the WSO2 Mashup Server 2.0.2

This document provides an introduction to the concepts and use of the Mashup Server, and will help you get started using Web service technology.

Web Services and Mashups

Mashups are becoming an increasingly important part of the information age. They allow you to tame the raging information flow and put it work for you. Rather than being forced to consume information in the way the publisher wishes it presented, increasingly users are finding the power to consume raw information, combine it with other data sources, customize and shape the results, and interact with that information. Getting information in the way you want it is the basis of XML-based Web Services.

XML is a language for exchanging information. It extends the valuable characteristics of HTML, which is limited to the domain of document publishing, to other fields. It allows one to use vocabularies specific to the information domain of the data. For instance, HTML has document-oriented concepts such as 'paragraph' and 'table', but no concept of 'price' or 'temperature'. XML allows you to define your own data vocabulary. With XML, the presentation of the information can be separated from the content of the information - the first step in making that information reusable by the consumer.

But if anyone can make up their own language, isn't that the Tower of Babel all over again? Indeed, to communicate effectively, two computers must agree on the data format (with XML this is easy since it's virtually universally accepted as a standard format), and on the vocabulary. Vertical industries and communities have evolved vocabularies that allow them to communicate within their domains. For instance, the HTML community can talk together in XML by using the XHTML vocabulary (HTML reformulated in XML). Bloggers can talk together in XML by using the RSS or Atom vocabularies. Thousands of formats have emerged to enable eBusiness transactions. But there still is a need for some human intervention to take disparate vocabularies and combine them into a new information stream.

Merging, or mashing-up data, thus is a process of acquiring XML (directly from the producers, or in some other legacy form that can be converted to XML), processing and combining that data, and publishing the results. If the result of the mashup is expressed as new XML data, it can again be shared with others, further mashed, and presented to the user in a variety of ways (including but not limited to HTML). The WSO2 Mashup Server is based on this model - that the central model for customizing information to a particular user's needs, is one of consuming, processing, and publishing XML.

How does one acquire XML? Web Services are a set of technologies that helps get XML from one place to another, providing protocols for describing what XML is available, how to ask for it, how to transmit the data securely, reliably, and so forth. From the perspective of the Mashup author, the less one has to know about the details of how the XML gets from one place to another, the better. The core functionality of the Mashup Server is to take care of this for you, allowing you to operate at the level of the XML content itself as much as possible.

Mashup products and frameworks all have several pieces in common. They provide ways to acquire data, they provide a central abstraction and tools for working with that data, and they provide ways to publish the result to the consumer. The WSO2 Mashup Server uses Web Services as the mechanism for acquiring data, XML as its central abstraction, Javascript (with E4X XML extensions) for manipulating that data, and again Web Services as the primary way to re-publish the new information stream, with bridges to HTML, RSS, and other output mechanisms.

In this User Guide, you will learn how to acquire, manipulate and publish XML data through Web Services, and how to build upon that foundation to create sophisticated distributed applications simply and rapidly.

WSO2 Mashup Server 2.0.2 Release

The 2.0.2 release of the WSO2 Mashup Server is mainly forcused on providing OSGi based WSO2 Carbon Platform support. Hence it is now based on award winning WSO2 Carbon Platform where users can add remove components with an ease. This is a unification of all Java based products from WSO2. Now you can have features from the lighweight superfast WSO2 ESB & the WSAS running on your Mashup Server instance. Enhanced admin UI, extensible server admin framework, separable frontend & backend where a single frontend server can be used to administer several backend servers and clustering are major features inherited from WSO2 Carbon Platform. It also have made enhancements for the former release, where sevaral featurs have added to enhace your experience in authoring services. This version also incorporates some defect fixes and usability enhancements and improves on the 1.5.2 release.

New features in the 2.0.2 release:

  • HttpClient Host Object
  • Scheduled Tasks management admin UI
  • Based on WSO2 Carbon SOA Framework, which will enable the one click feature management such as Data Services in the future releases of Mashup Server.
Please refer to the Mashup Server v2.0.2 Release Note for more details.

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