WSO2 today announced the debut of WSO2 Carbon Studio, the Eclipse-based integrated developer environment (IDE) for the WSO2 Carbon. WSO2 Carbon Studio provides a new level of ease in building service-oriented architecture (SOA) and composite applications based on WSO2 Carbon, the industry’s only fully componentized middleware platform. Highlights of WSO2 Carbon Studio include the ability to:

 * Organize artifacts that span the multiple runtimes common to composite applications into a single project—a Carbon Application (CApp).  For instance, a single project might encompass the configuration of a WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 ESB), the provision of a WSO2 Governance Registry, and BPEL for execution in the WSO2 Business Process Server (WSO2 BPS).

 * Develop applications using tools designed for Carbon-based products including the WSO2 ESB, WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSO2 WSAS), WSO2 BPS, WSO2 Governance Registry, and more.

 * Test and debug Carbon-based applications directly within the IDE.

 * Export Carbon Applications in the new Carbon Archive format. This archive represents the entire project and simplifies the deployment of composite applications spanning multiple systems into a production environment.

“We have found that many of our customers are developing sophisticated applications that span the WSO2 Carbon product family, and they are taking advantage of the unique strengths of our platform when used as a whole,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, founder and CEO of WSO2. “We’re now revving up our tooling support with WSO2 Carbon Studio—helping developers to organize, develop, test, and deploy these composite applications with greater ease than ever before. This illustrates WSO2’s commitment to continuously searching and destroying the hassles developers and IT staff may encounter, and helping businesses fully realize the contributions of SOA to the bottom line.”

Develop in WSO2 Carbon Studio
The WSO2 Carbon Studio IDE is designed specifically to take advantage of the open source WSO2 Carbon middleware platform. The WSO2 Carbon family of products share a unified management console and provides a consistent set of enterprise-class management, security, clustering, logging, statistics, tracing, and other capabilities. As a result developers avoid the integration complexity and redundancy of traditional middleware platforms. Using WSO2 Carbon Studio, developers can easily create applications that work with any of the ten componentized WSO2 Carbon-based middleware products—and more easily develop applications that leverage more than one product.

The Eclipse-based WSO2 Carbon Studio facilitates the development and configuration of code for SOA and composite applications based on WSO2 Carbon. It includes graphical editors for XML configuration files, an enhanced Eclipse BPEL editor, and easy integration of WSO2 Carbon-based applications with the WSO2 Governance Registry. Additionally, WSO2 Carbon Studio offers a rich set of third-party Eclipse plug-ins, including the OpenSocial Gadget Editor and Maven IDE.

Deploy and Test with WSO2 Carbon Studio
Central to Carbon Studio is functionality to support the many enterprise SOA projects that often combine multiple application types into a single composite application or service. With WSO2 Carbon Studio, developers can create a Carbon Application project that includes services running on multiple WSO2 Carbon servers, for example the WSO2 ESB, WSO2 Data Services Server and WSO2 Gadget Server.

With Carbon Studio, developers also have single-click simplicity for testing Java-based applications and services—without leaving the IDE. Debugging tools support Axis2-based services, Apache Synapse mediators, registry handlers, and data validators.

With a tested CApp in hand, developers can then deploy their code in production using a WSO2 Carbon Archive (CAR). Each server the CAR is deployed to will extract the relevant part of the application, allowing the application topology to become a reliable part of the CApp definition instead of implied through a complex multi-server deployment process.

WSO2 Carbon Studio Tools
WSO2 Carbon provides a complete set of tools to support all aspects of SOA development. These include:

 * Apache Axis2 and JAX-WS Tooling: create open services from existing or new Java code.

 * Data Service Tooling: expose existing data sources as secure open services.

 * BPEL Tooling: create industry standard workflows and automated processes.

 * ESB Tooling: create flows and mediation based on the Apache Synapse / WSO2 ESB configuration model.

 * Gadget Editor: create gadgets and portal UIs using the OpenSocial / Google Gadget specification.

 * Registry Tooling: manage resources in the WSO2 Governance Registry.

Availability and Support
WSO2 Carbon Studio is available today as a set of Eclipse plug-ins. Like all WSO2 SOA middleware products, it is a fully open source solution released under Eclipse and Apache Licenses and does not carry any licensing fees. WSO2 offers a range of service and support options for WSO2 Carbon Studio, including development support and production support.