WSO2 Mashup Server

» see wso2.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

This one was for the server room, and I was a student when it launched. Enterprise middleware out of Colombo is about as far from a Turkish university dorm connection as software gets, so what follows is the record rather than a memory.

WSO2 Mashup Server 1.0 was released on 28 January 2008 and was described at the time as the first open source server solution for mashups. The company behind it was WSO2, founded in 2005 and working out of Sri Lanka and California, and the thing was built on Apache Axis2 with WSO2's own web services application server and registry underneath.

The pitch was unusually concrete for the period. You wrote server-side JavaScript in Notepad or anything else and saved it, and the server published it as a real web service with a WSDL and an endpoint. Your script could pull in feeds or scrape a page, and whatever it emitted became something another program could call. Each mashup was not a widget on a dashboard, it was a new service that other mashups could consume in turn.

~ the case file ~

~ the mashup moment ~

For about three years "mashup" was a word serious people used in roadmaps. Yahoo had Pipes and Microsoft had Popfly. Google shipped a Mashup Editor of its own. All of them were hosted boxes with a visual editor where you dragged a feed into a filter. WSO2's was the odd one: no wires and no drag and drop, just a server you ran yourself and a language you already knew.

That choice reads better now than it did then. The visual editors are all dead and so is this, but the underlying bet, that composing services is a programming job and the programmers want a text file, is how the whole category eventually settled. Version 1.5 added data services and more security. The final release, 2.3.2, came out on 1 November 2011.

~ the folding-in ~

On 8 December 2012 Jonathan Marsh, who had joined WSO2 in 2006 as its Director of Architecture for Mashup Technologies and was by then VP of Strategy, published a post titled "WSO2 Mashup Server, where to now?". The answer was that the remaining useful part, hosting JavaScript as web services, had been built into WSO2 Application Server, so the Mashup Server came out of the product menus and its page started pointing at the Application Server instead.

No shutdown notice, no migration deadline, no users locked out, because anyone running it was running it on their own hardware and could keep doing so indefinitely. The product died the way open source infrastructure usually does, by its vendor quietly declining to mention it again.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »