Carbon: Towards a Server Building Framework for SOA Platform

Following is the slides I presented at the 5th International Workshop on Middleware for Service Oriented Computing (co-located with Middleware 2010, India). The paper can be found in http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1890914 and here.

The paper presents Carbon, the underline platform for all WSO2 products. Based on OSGI, Carbon provides a server building framework for SOA with a kernel, which handles most of the details regarding building SOA servers. The paper discusses the design decisions, potential impact, and its relationship to state of art in the Component Based Software Engineering.

Carbon: Towards a Server Building Framework for SOA Platform

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BISSA: Empowering Web gadget Communication with Tuple Spaces

Following is a talk I did at the 8th International Workshop on Middleware for Grids, Clouds and e-Science (co located with Super Computing 2010 at New Orleans). The research paper with the same title can be found at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1890809.

The paper presents Biassa, a scalable tuple space implementation on top of a Distributed Hash Table, and its application as an inter gadget communication medium. This is the outcome of a University of Moratuwa final year project done by Pradeep Fernando, Charith Wickramarachchi, Dulanjanie Sumanasena, and Udayanga Wickramasinghe and supervised by Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana  and myself. I am elated that MRT final year projects can go this far!

BISSA: Empowering Web gadget Communication with Tuple Spaces

View more presentations from Srinath Perera.

An Scaling pattern: Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate’s Opinion

The paper “Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate’s Opinion” provides an inserting a scaling pattern to cope without transactions for very large scale.

The idea can be described using three things: entities, activities, and using workflows instead of transactions.

• entity is a single collection of data that lives within a single scope of serializability (e.g. cluster). Each entity has a unique key, and transactions cannot expand multiple entities.
• Activity is a relationship between two entities (holds all state about such a relationship).
• Finally, the key idea is that entities cope by not doing transactions with each other, but handling the uncertainty rise out of lack of transactions through a workflow. 
• The author makes an interesting observation that normal world does not have transactions, but cope with uncertainties through time limits, compensations, cancellations etc., or in other words cope through a workflow. So he argues that activities should be carried out with tentative message, confirmation or cancellation model.

So does that scale? Yes, handling stabilizability within one entity is very much possible, and rest is data partition, which is well understood. Only key decider is that can we model uncertainties that arise from lack of transactions through workflows. My gut feeling is most of the time we can, but there certainly are exceptions.