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WSO2 Application Server: What it is, features and first steps

A company’s web application or web app is very useful for both users and all the mobile applications they use, as well as for business processes, workflows or their corresponding analysis. WSO2 Application Server, developed by open software application company WSO2, enables easy sharing of business logic, data and processes across an organization’s IT ecosystem.

What is WSO2 Application Server?

WSO2 Application Server is a native cloud solution, developed as part of a service oriented architecture for professional developers, which ­provides a solid foundation for hosting shared, multi-tenant and elastically scalable SaaS applications. WSO2 Application Server brings together the best open source technologies for web applications (like Apache Tomcat), web services (like Apache Axis2), or RESTful services (like JAX-RS). All this with the option to manage, monitor and perform cluster analysis using WSO2’s open source.

WSO2 Application Server features

WSO2 Application Server has a number of features that make it a very relevant solution. Thanks to it, the following properties can be transferred to the organization and managed.

  • Hosting and management of web applications.

It provides a complete WAR file management console, with integrated application security management and basic integration of Auth to LDAP, Google Auth, OpenID and other external user stores. It features JavaEE 6 Web profile support and session persistence to permanently store HTTP session details, enabling failover and load balancing in an application server cluster. Virtual hosting to maintain multiple domain names under the same IP address. Full-duplex communication over a single TCP connection using the WebSocket 1.1 API.

  • Hosting and administration of web services.

Support for SOAP services and JAX-WS services; support for RESTful services with JAX-RS, HTTP/JSON using HTTP methods and status codes; integration of Apache Axis2 and Apache CXF web service engines; and all major WS-standards supported, including SOAP 11, SOAP 1.2, MTOM, XOP, SwA, WSDL 1.1, WSDL 2.0, WS-Addressing, WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Policy, WS-PolicyAttachment, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-ReliableMessaging or WS-Discovery.

  • Host and manage Jaggery applications.

Jaggery is a framework for writing applications using Javascript on the server, JSON for communication and Javascript on the client. It allows the deployment of any Jaggery web application or RESTful web service.

It facilitates integrated application security management as well as basic authentication integration with LDAP, Google Auth, OpenID and other external user stores. Also the integration with WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus and WSO2 Identity Server, allowing detailed authorization. It has OpenID capabilities for trusted groups.

  • Provide a rich context for programming scalable applications and services.

Comprehensive, easy-to-use APIs for developing business applications that free developers from the complexities of security, data management, metadata management, and system performance It integrates with the company’s identity management systems via LDAP or via WSO2 Identity Server. Distributed cache for large-scale application and service performance

  • Provide a scalable, cloud-enabled, multi-tenant application server platform.

WSO2 Application Server makes it possible to easily build and deploy SaaS applications with this WSO2 solution as a shared, multi-tenant and elastic scaling platform. Also deploy Apache Tomcat multi-tenant applications using rich context APIs, as well as build self-service SaaS applications with integrated billing and metering capabilities. It can also be deployed as an Application Server for the enterprise.

  • Lightweight, easy to develop and implement.

Easy to develop, configure and deploy both applications and services with tools for message tracking and interactive testing with TryIt’s capabilities. Extremely easy security management and server customization by provisioning features from any WSO2 middleware capacity. Allows choice of deployment between on-premises servers, private cloud or managed cloud WSO2 Application Server is integrated with SVN, Maven, Ant and other standard development and deployment tools as well as WSO2 Developer Studio, an Eclipse based IDE for all WSO2 products.

  • Management and supervision.

Complete management and monitoring of role-based access control (RBAC) Integrated collection and monitoring of standard access and performance statistics JMX MBeans for all key metrics management and monitoring features In addition, it integrates with the WSO2 Business Activity Monitor for operational audit and KPI/SLA monitoring and management. It offers flexible registration support with integration to the company’s registration systems.