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| Sunday, 20 November 2005 |
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Interview with the Apache Axis 2 Team When it comes to web services our little Sri Lanka has earned a name for itself. Thanks to our hard working engineers names like Apache Axis, Kandula, and Sandesha have become world renowned names in the web services arena. This interview with the Axis 2 Team will definitely be an inspiration to you all. Q: What exactly is Axis 2? A: Axis 2 is the next generation web service framework. If you look at the history of web service stacks there are 3 identifiable generations. Apache SOAP belongs to the first generation. It is the earliest and most primitive type of framework. Apache Axis belongs to the second generation. Axis was much faster and better. It had good architectural support for WSDL and other web services specifications. While Axis had many improvements it had limitations like being built on a RPC model. Hence it assumes that there is a response for all requests. People needed performance and by then web services have become popular. Everybody wants web services everywhere. That is the motivation for Axis2. Axis aims to increase performance, support new specifications and to be more generic, without assuming any request response patterns. Q: The success of Axis2 will eventually depend on the amount of users who are ready to accept this product. How about the response Axis2 is getting so far? A: Response has been really great. There was a huge enthusiasm in the user community when we went to ApacheCon (Europe 2005) there were people asking lot of questions in the tutorials. The audience at the session was stunned about the Axis2 capabilities and was asking many interesting questions at the end of the session. The other interesting thing is that we have not yet released a proper version yet. But still there are whole lots of people who are using Axis2 already. Axis2 is still at 0.92 release. If you look at the mailing list there are lots of mails coming. If we don't look at Axis mails for one day there would be around 50 to 60 mails outstanding. Q: What are the other emerging 3rd generations SOAP stacks that you consider as competitors and parallel implementations to Axis2? A: First thing is Microsoft Indigo. Second is WASP. Indigo is a good competitor. We were able to interoperate with them very well. We did some successful security and MTOM interoperability tests. Reliable Messaging interoperability workshop is coming up. Again if we thing of this in a commercial manner, you should not think of it as competition. Open source is overall the community rather than the product. If you think of the product itself even in a nature of competition you can say that Indigo and Axis are peer to peer products. We strive to interoperate with each other. The Focus is not beating Indigo but to co exist with it. Q: With this project you all have emphasized the Sri Lankan presence in the global open source map. How did you guys get the chance to team up and involve in this open source project? A: Most of us got fellowship from SIDA through Lanka Software Foundation. We worked full time one year in Lanka Software Foundation to build Axis2. When we were at the Computer Science & Engineering Department of University of Moratuwa as undergraduates most of us were taught by Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarna. As our final year projects all of us got involved in open source related projects based on web services. Obviously we knew quite lot about web services at the end of the day. So we all got hooked up here. Q: It seems you all are going further from the experience of the final year undergraduate projects to a globally competitive open source product. What do you all feel about open source software development? A: Excellent. Thumbs up. Some people still think that Open source products are not stable, no support. Just come to Axis or any other Apache projects and feel the difference. You can see some of the vest software projects are open source. Best example is Apache HTTPD server. It is THE most used web server in the world; it has more than 75% of the market share. In our personal feeling, open source development is quite satisfactory. Working in a company you'll be only able to satisfy your boss. But if you do it in open source it'll satisfy people all around the globe and you will be recognized all around the world. We feel it. Most of the people who are outside know us at least by name. Actually we are getting some good offers too. It is a huge boost to the ego. In normal development works you use technology and tools developed by others. Here we are making the next generation of technology. In open source we do not have separate architects, developers or QA's. We do everything. The software community automatically does our QA. Q: Some may think that you all are just wasting your time and money for an open source project, which does not bring anything to our country. How do you feel that the open source software development will affect Sri Lanka? A: Have you heard of Sri Lankan tea? When you go and drink tea in Japan, Germany or anywhere else in the world, if you go and say Sri Lankan tea, people will know that Sri Lankan tea is the best and it is the most expensive. Similarly what we are trying to do here is to make a name for Sri Lanka. We want people to say "Yeah... It should be good". Here's a good example of the current impact it has on Sri Lanka. There's a site which provides software outsourcing opportunities. Recently a friend of mine was looking for a oppurtnity and applied for a certain product. The person who is buying his work saw that he is from Sri Lanka and that person asked my friend a question. "Hey! Do you know Dr Sanjeewa Weerawarna and the Axis 2 guys from Sri Lanka?" I think that itself speaks for the recognition Sri Lanka is getting and would get in the future. |
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