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Tips to write an Enterprise Application On WSO2 Platform

Enterprise applications or Business Applications, are complex, scalable and distributed. They could deploy on corporate networks, Intranet or Internet. Usually they are data centric and user-friendly. And they must meet certain security, administration and maintenance requirements.
Typically Enterprise Applications are large. Which is multi user, runs on clustered environments, contains large number of components, manipulates large amount of data and may use parallel processing and distributed resources. And they will try to meet some business requirements and at the same time it should provide robust and maintenance, monitoring and administration.
Here are some features and attributes that may include in an Enterprise Application.


  • Complex business logic.
  • Read / Write data to / from databases.
  • Distributed Computing.
  • Message Oriented Middleware.
  • Directory and naming services
  • Security
  • User Interfaces (Web and / or Desktop)
  • Integration of Other systems
  • Administration and Maintenance
  • High availability
  • High integrity
  • High mean time between failure
  • Do not lose or corrupt data in failures.
The advantages of using WSO2 platform to develop and deploy an Enterprise Application is that most of above are supported by WSO2 platform itself. So in this blog entry I am going to provide some tips to develop and deploy an Enterprise Application in WSO2 platform.












Read / Write data to / from databases.

In WSO2 platform convention of using databases is access them through datasources. Here the developer can use WSO2 SS (Storage Server) [1] to create the databases. [2]. So the developer of the Application can create the database needed and if needed add the data to database console provided by WSO2 SS which is explained in [2]. For security reasons we can restrict developers to use the mysql instances only through WSO2 SS by restricting the access outside the network.

After creating a database next step would be to create a datasource. For this purpose developer can create a datasource in WSO2 AS (Application Server) [3] and [4] explains how to add and manage data sources. As it is explained in [5] developer can expose the created data source as a JNDI resource and developer can use the data source/s in the application code as explained there.

Use Distributed Computing and Message Oriented Middleware provided by WSO2

WSO2 ESB can be used to add Distributed computing to the application. [6] and [7] explains how the developer can use WSO2 ESB functionalities to add Distributed Computing to the his / her application.

 WSO2 ESB also supports JMS (Java Messaging Service) [8] which is a widely used API in Java-based Message Oriented Middleware. It facilitates loosely coupled, reliable, and asynchronous communication between different components of a distributed application.

Store Configuration, Endpoints in WSO2 Registry.

And developer can store configuration, endpoints in registry provided by each WSO2 product. So registry have three parts.


  • Governance - Shared across the whole platform
  • Config - Shared across the current cluster
  • Local - Only available to current instance
Normally developer need to store data in governance if that data needs to be accessed by other WSO2 products as well. Otherwise he/she needs to store data in config registry.


Directory And Naming Services Provided by WSO2 Platform

All WSO2 Products can be use with LDAP, AD or any other Directory or Naming services and WSO2 Carbon APIs provide developer the APIs which can do operations with these Directory or Naming services. This is handled using User Store Managers implemented in WSO2  products [9]. Anyone who will use WSO2 products can extend these User Store Managers to map it to their Directory structure. [10] provides a sample of how to use these Carbon APIs in side application to access the Directory Services from the Application.

Exposing APIs and Services

Web app developer can expose some APIs / Webservices from his / her application and he / she can publish them via WSO2 API Manager [21] so everyone can access them. In this way the Application can be integrated in to the other systems and the application can use the existing APIs without implementing them again.

 And there is another commonly used feature in WSO2 Platform. The data sources created using WSO2 AS / WSO2 DSS can be exposed as data services and these data services can be exposed as APIs from WSO2 API Manager  [22] .

 The advantage of using WSO2 API Manager in this case is mainly security. WSO2 API Manager provides oauth 2.0 based security.

Security

When providing security we can provide security to the application by providing authentication and authorization. And we can provide security to the deployment by applying Java security and Secure vaults. And services deployed can be secured using Apache Rampart [11] [12].
To provide authentication and authorization to the Application developer can use the functionalities provided by the WSO2 IS (Identity Server) [13]. Commonly SAML SSO is used to provide authentication. [14] explains how SSO works, how to configure to work with SAML SSO and so on.

 For authorization purposes developer can use the Carbon APIs provided in WSO2 products which is described in [15].

 Java Security Manager can be used with WSO2 products so the deployment can be secured with the security provided by the policy file. As explained in [16] Carbon Secure Vaults can be used to store passwords in a secure way.

Develop an Application to deploy on Application Server

[20] provides a user guide to develop and deploy an java application on WSO2 AS. This documentation discuss about class loading, session replication, writing Java, JAX - RS, JAX - WS, Jaggery and Spring applications, Service Development Deployment and Management, usage of JAVA EE and so on.

Administration, Maintenance and Monitoring

WSO2 BAM (Business Activity Monitor) [17] can be use to collect logs and create some dashboards which will let people to monitor the status of the system. [18] explains how data can be aggregated, processed and presented with WSO2 BAM.


Clustering

WSO2 Products which are based on Apache Axis2, Can be clustered. [19] provides clustering tips and how to cluster WSO2 products. By clustering the high availability can be achieved in the system.

References

[22] https://docs.wso2.org/display/AS521/Data+Services
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