confused with the relationship between WSO2's products

Question

After study WSO2 products, seems I got the following concepts, all of them are only my understanding, I don't know whether is correct or not, please advice:

1. All the products are running in Carbon which is a 'container' of the wso2 products, something like JSP like stuffs running in tomcat. am I right?

2. if No.1 is correct, so 'Enterprise Service Bus', 'Identity Server', 'Data Service Server', 'Governance Reistry' etc are all running in Carbon Server, actually I downloaded all the products, and I found they are all released with carbon together, which mean I can use command to start the management console directly, and each of them can running themselves, they have there own management console. right?

3. after I read Carbon user guide, it says 'all the products of wso2 are the components of Carbon', so I think 'Enterprise Service Bus', 'Identity Server', 'Data Service Server', 'Governance Reistry' can be put into one management console, which mean they can be integrated together, after I started Carbon server, all the features are running together?

I'm sorry ask such kind a stupid question, but after read many articles I still cant find out the structure between them, please advice, thanks in advance.

Answer 1

WSO2 middleware products come with a bunch of components. These are based on Java OSGi. So every product comes with a set of OSGi bundles (in OSGi terminology). Carbon is a core framework that's common to every product. This is again a bunch of OSGi components. Carbon core (which is also reffered to as just Carbon) contains a set of must have bundles. Logging, clustering, security etc... Carbon is a separate download also which you can run. Running carbon itself by its own is not very interesting unless you're doing something specific and you know what you're doing.

Now, coming back to the products .. each product have carbon core plus some more OSGi components. These additional components reflect product specific functionality. For example if you take the ESB, it's carbon core plus additional components that makes it an "ESB". Likewise for other products.

You can take the carbon server and install all these additional features. Feature installation is done via the same technology Eclipse is using to install plugins. Since everything is an OSGi bundle there has to be an OSGi container that all these run on. Carbon is running on top of Equinox OSGi container.

So Tomcat is also a separate OSGi bundle. You can install these components into any running carbon server and instantly add webapp hosting capability.

Answer 2

1. Yes. All WSO2 products are running inside WSO2 Carbon which is mainly a OSGi based framework.

2. Yes. A WSO2 Product (e.g., ESB) is a specialized Carbon framework. Management console is a part of Carbon where you can install external features to the product / uninstall existing features in the product to customize the product.

3. Yes theoretically. If the Carbon concept is correctly implemented in all the components of WSO2, they (ESB, IS, DSS as you said) should be installable in a single Carbon server without any problem using the WSO2 Feature Manager. But due to some dependency conflicts and version conflicts sometimes it may not be possible if you try to do it. But still you can resolve these OSGi conflicts in code level and make it possible to make them compatible, if you want.

Actually all the WSO2 products share the WSO2 components seamlessly among their products already. And in some instances we recommend to install multiple products in a single Carbon server. For example CEP feature is asked to be installed in BAM product when the user wants to use CEP as a realtime data processing solution with the BAM. For most other product combinations we have not yet tested well so the conflicts can occur. Thats why I said this theoretical.