WSO2 offers open source community a poor man's BPM - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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March 17, 2008
WSO2 offers open source community a poor man's BPM

I met up with Jonathan Marsh of WSO2 last week; I introduced you to WSO2 in mid 2007 via a Talking to… interview with Paul Freemantle. Jonathan’s role is Director of Architecture for Mashup Technologies but he prefers to call himself a “product designer for people.” He joined the UK-based open source software (OSS) organization in 2007 from that alleged OSS nemesis, Microsoft.

But no Microbashing in this interview. Jonathan simply felt OSS—and WSO2 in particular—provided him personally a better way to “design for people.” This is partially because he didn’t want to move to the company’s headquarters location, something that is highly encouraged in any large non-OSS development organization. He also believes OSS’ community aspect is especially well suited for people-oriented software design.

Although new to OSS, Jonathan is not new to community-based activities. At Microsoft, he had worked on the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) as Microsoft representative, and was co-chair of the WSDL 2.0 group. Microsoft’s involvement in standards activity such as WSDL illustrates its understanding of their importance. Jonathan sees a lot of similarities between standards and OSS in terms of there being community, processes, and a wide variety of contributors. (Truth in advertising: I told Jonathan of my objections to all de jure standards groups but I agree with the similarities analogy.)

One difference he pointed out: the end product of standards communities is a specification and a test suite for 50-100 vendors. The end product for a successful OSS project is thousands or millions of users. Another thing Jonathan’s Microsoft experience brings to WSO2 is an understanding of what it takes to bring to market a product that might be used by millions of users.

If you want to see the beginnings of how that might work out, look at mooshup.com where the community is getting off the ground. The site is based on the WSO2 mashup server also. The server is available under the Apache license and can be downloaded from mooshup.com and the WS02 site. Consistent with the business strategy for its middleware (web server plus ESB plus new registry), WSO2 will provide service and support of course.

Looking at the functionality, Jonathan positions the mashup server as a natural extension of WSO2's middleware to “service composition.” In his product design for people, he wanted to do something more friendly and lightweight than the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). I think of it as a poor man’s business process management BPM (watch for my upcoming blog posts on BPM by the way; my initial feature article for ebizQ on BPM is available here for ebizQ Gold Club members—no cost to join). Given his standards background, the mashup server ties into the WSDL standard; like the way a web server works.