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How to start WSO2 Carbon AMIs

The latest product versions of WSO2 SOA platform are available for download now. This release addresses various bug fixes and enhancements. In addition to the usual binary, source and document distributions, WSO2 products are now available as cloud virtual machines.
WSO2 cloud virtual machines provides you with the ability to implement your SOA infrastructure in private or public cloud. In this post, we will look at how AMIs of WSO2 Carbon family of products can be used.
I will use WSO2 ESB AMI for the demonstration, however you can follow the same steps to start any of the WSO2 Carbon AMI.

Pre-requisite:
You should have the necessary Amazon EC2 account ready for AMI administration. AMI EC2 API tools should be installed in your computer. You may refer to this tutorial in order to set up the infrastructure.

Step 1
Go to WSO2 ESB home page in Oxygen Tank. Click on WSO2 Cloud Service under the Download icon.
You will find WSO2 ESB cloud virtual machines in that page. Take a note of AMI ID given there (ami-878569ee)

Step2
Open a shell and issue the following command to start 64bit WSO2 ESB AMI instance.

ec2-run-instances ami-878569ee -k --instance-type m1.large

Replace with the name of your public/private keypair. Read http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonEC2/gsg/2006-06-26/running-an-instance.html if you do not know hot to generate a keypair.


Step 3

The above command starts up an AMI instance with a pre-configured WSO2 ESB server. Also, the above will return the ID of the started instance (instance-id).

e.g:-

INSTANCE i-c28093aa ami-878569ee pending charithakankanamgewso2-keypair 0 m1.large 2010-02-04T06:03:25+0000 us-east-1c aki-a3d737ca ari-7cb95a

After a few seconds, issue the following command to get the public DNS name of WSO2 ESB so that we can access ESB management console.

ec2-describe-instances

e.g:- ec2-describe-instances i-c28093aa

This will return the public DNS name as follows.

INSTANCE i-c28093aa ami-878569ee ec2-174-129-86-140.compute-1.amazonaws.com domU-12-31-39-0C-21-B2.compute-1.internal

Step 4

Open a browser and access URL, https://ec2-174-129-86-140.compute-1.amazonaws.com. You will be able to log in to WSO2 ESB management console.

Importance of logging in QA testing

Recently James Bach posted a nice blog entry in which he identified logging as a good friend of an exploratory test team. I believe the comprehensive logging of AUT (application under test) is an extremely valuable asset to any tester regardless of the context of exploratory testing.
A detailed log will surely help to minimize the effort required to reproduction of issues. There are intermittent failures, random application crashes which are extermely hard to regenerate in successive attempts. If the AUT is written in a way in which all the major user events are logged, then the root causes of such random failures can be traced easily.
A comprehensive log is a useful test report. After a test run, you can store the log somewhere safely and use it as the test report. Specially, in agile test processes, test teams do not find sufficient time to record test results and maintain detailed test reports due to the short release cycles. If the AUT provides good set of logs, it will help testers to use them instead of maintaining separate test logs.

IMHO, comprehensive logging is a must have feature of any of the enterprise-scale application. At WSO2, this has been identified as a extremely important tool and the necessary modifications are in-progress to improve logging in WSO2 Carbon SOA middleware suite.

Enabling hotupdate in Apache Axis2

This is for some of the readers of this blog who requested me numerous times a simple post on how to enable hotupdate in Axis2.

Hot Update refers to the ability to make changes to an existing Web Service without even shutting down the system. This is very important when you test your web services. However, it is not advisable to use hot update in production servers, because it may lead a system into an unknown state. Because of that, Axis2 comes with the hot update parameter set to FALSE by default.

In order to enable hotupdate, you could simple edit the following parameter in AXIS2_HOME/conf/axis2.xml



<parameter name="hotupdate">true</parameter>



If you use WSO2 Carbon based product such as WSO2 WSAS, WSO2 ESB or WSO2 BPS, you can follow the same procedure.

How to install WSO2 Carbon cluster management feature

I have written and published a tutorial on wso2.org which guides you through the steps of installing WSO2 Carbon cluster management feature.

Selenium test reporting with maven surefire report plugin

If you are familiar with Junit, you may have already known the maven surefire plugin which enables running unit test inside maven build cycles. Normally, surefire plugin generates the XML test reports at /target/surefire-reports directory. If you use selenium RC integrated with your build system or as a separate test framework, you may use maven-selenium-plugin coupled with the surefire plugin to launch your tests.
As far as I know, there are two ways to generate test reports when selenium is coupled with maven.

1. Use LoggingSelenium java library to generate HTML test reports with screenshots

2. Use maven-surefire-report plugin

This post is about the latter one, maven-surefire-report plugin.

The default configuration of surefire-report-plugin is trivial. You just need to add a <reporting> element to projects' pom.xml as follows.

<reporting>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <
<configuration>
<outputDirectory>${basedir}/target/wso2qa</outputDirectory>
</configuration>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</reporting>


When you run mvn surefire-report:report goal after running the tests, HTML based descriptive report will be created at the specified output directory. In this mechanism, you do not use anything specific to selenium,but get the advantage of surefire report plugin in test reporting.

Running WSO2 Carbon based products on IBM JDK

The next minor release of WSO2 Carbon product platform (2.0.2) will be fully compatible with IBM JDK (IBM J9 VM 2.4). You simply need to update transports.xml as follows in order to run any of the WSO2 carbon based product on IBM JDK.

Open CARBON_HOME/transports.xml

Add the following parameter to HTTPS transport configuration

<parameter name="algorithm">IBMX509</parameter>

Now, restart carbon. Server will be started successfully on IBM JDK.

Carbon-2.0.2 product platform will be released within next week. Stay tuned..