Introducing WSO2 Carbon 5 (C5)

Carbon 5 will be the next generation of WSO2 Carbon Platform.

Over the years, the existing carbon platform was used to build different set of products at WSO2 and helped implementing many solutions. The platform has gained maturity over time. This maturity and the experiences acquired over time, helped to identify the areas which can be improved or can be implemented using a better way in carbon platform.

Carbon Kernel is the base framework for all the WSO2 products. The core concepts of kernel such as deployment, clustering, configuration and context model, multi-tenancy, etc are inspired from and developed using the kernel architecture of Apache Axis2. The Apache Axis2 is a web-services engine. But its is also a server framework with the run-time and configuration model, which can be run independently. This was adopted at carbon kernel and this made carbon kernel tightly coupled with Apache Axis2.

Another point is that over time, like any other software systems, carbon kernel also has gained weight. There are more modules to manage now in carbon kernel alone. This increases the possibility of frequent patching and maintenance releases.

What’s new in C5 Carbon Kernel?

The Carbon Kernel for C5 will be a general purpose OSGi run-time. It will contain minimal features required for developing servers on top of it. The Carbon Kernel will be re-architect from scratch with the latest technologies and patterns to overcome the existing architectural limitations and will focus on the areas which can be improved as well as removing tight dependencies to projects like Apache Axis2.

The Milestone plan for Carbon 5 Kernel

M1

• Migrating to Equinox Kepler
• Centralized Logging-backend
• Moving the codebase from SVN to GIT
• Basic C5 runtime

M2

• User API design and implementation
• Carbon Deployment Engine

M3

• Carbon Clustering API and Implementation
• Pluggable Runtime Framework
• Configuration and Context Model
• Repository API and implementation

M4

• Improved Patching model
• Plugging Tomcat to C5

M5

• RESTFul admin services framework
• Jaggery based UI framework
• Per tenant security manager and Thread monitoring

M6

• Composite application model for C5
• Plugging Axis2 run-time to C5
• Improved Feature Manger implementation.

The first milestone was recently released with the deliverables mentioned. It can be downloaded from here.