Saturday, November 01, 2008

A new beginning..

After a bit over two and a half years at WSO2, I am starting my own consulting practice today as an independent consultant! The past couple of years has been both very interesting and challenging.

I worked mostly on the Apache Synapse Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and built the WSO2 branded version of it as WSO2 ESB, and took both of these through many releases. The development of the non-blocking http/s transport was the most challenging problem we solved, that allowed Synapse to scale to support thousands of concurrent connections utilizing a small thread pool of workers. The NIO transport now supports constant memory throttling, utilizing some of the very cool features of the Apache HttpComponents/NIO. I learn't a lot about the complexities of NIO and the issues with the HTTP/S protocol from Oleg Kalnichevski who contributes immensely to HttpComponenets. I've also worked on implementing the JMS transport, the Mail transport and the File system transport for Synapse and Axis2, and also built an abstract transport framework that allows one to write a new transport with minimal effort.

Ruwan, Indika, Chathura, Upul, Evanthika, Chanaka, Saliya and Dinuka were my team mates from WSO2, and both Sanjiva and Paul helped me immensely during these years to reach my targets. We beat both proprietary ESB's as well as other open source ESB's during three rounds of performance testing we carried out, and these tests have now become a defacto standard for ESB's, followed by both BEA (now Oracle) and Mule who ran the same tests.

I will continue to work on Apache Synapse and be available for consulting, training and development assistance around Apache Synapse, open source middleware, enterprise Java and performance testing and tuning. Thus, I have setup my consulting partnership http://adroitlogic.org which is officially starting today.. This is the first time that I am leaving permanent employment after working for over 10 years for IBM Sri Lanka, the National Institute of Business Management, Virtusa (Nasdaq:VRTU) and WSO2.. but I am confident that I will reach my objectives, while enjoying more free time with my kids and family.

So I leave my boats behind
Leave them on familiar shores
Set my heart upon the deep
Follow you again, my Lord!
[http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-EEadyvswaKcb8ZXz15O_?p=1]