The Smashing Magazine posted a nice article on infographics, and their example was “The World of Programming”, that’s a job well done

The requirement is to only serve the login page securely and once the user is authenticated (s)he should be redirected to non-secure http mode. I was struggling to do this quite some time back, and just thought of documenting about it.

The requirement

The idea I had was; “It should be quite simple”, Facebook does that, Google does that and why is it still not well documented ?, However the almost all Google search results for my queries were about simply redirecting HTTP traffic to HTTPS for certain URLs, some were using URL rewriting (mod_rewrite), and some have used server configuration via Tomcat’s server.xml.

What I really wanted to achieve is to preserve the state between the protocol switch. After some considerable amount of searching I found out this is not achievable (in a very clean manner) with tomcat or rather it is a conflict between security and state management in the servlet spec itself, hence there only exist a dirty hack (not sure if this works) to get it done, but even that hack couldn’t be applied to my scenario.

So after some thinking I came up with my own hack (I think its even dirtier ) to solve the issue; Its quite simple, and involves cookie manipulation. My approach was simply read the HTTPS cookie and set it as the HTTP cookie, what I need was one jsp which is served with HTTPS and few lines of Java code.

The solution

True enough it certainly looks like a hack, but security wise its as same as the Tomcat user group has suggested. so until the new servlet specification answers this question we have to live with this. the code of converting the cookies are as follows.

    Cookie[] cookies = request.getCookies();
    String sessionId;
    if (cookies != null) {
        for (Cookie c : cookies) {
            if (c.getName().equals("JSESSIONID")) {
                sessionId = c.getValue();
            }
        }
    }

    Cookie k = new Cookie("JSESSIONID", sessionId);
    k.setPath(request.getContextPath());
    response.addCookie(k);

Basically what the code does is, reading the secure cookies while inside the middle.jsp and setting them without security (k.setSecure() is not mentioned hence by default its false), and that’s about it, once this is done you can simply redirect to the HTTP page.

response.sendRedirect("http://foo.com:8080/index.jsp");

and now the cookie which originally set via HTTPS is accessible to the HTTP requests, hence the session is shared.

Today I was working on a customer POC and happened to create few Google gadgets to visualize selected data sets from *.gov.uk sites. The scenario which is implemented was, mixed with inter-gadget communication and content search over data.gov.uk sites. I created three simple gadgets which communicates with each other, and one acted as the controlling gadget which pushed the search parameters to other two gadgets. The two content gadgets showed UK (1) primary school information and (2) electoral information. The pushed parameter was the postal code of different parts of UK. The direct.gov.uk has a form based implementation of this.

The Requirements for the POC was, simple and we already had working samples of such a scenario at WSO2 library.

1. Show how one gadget can pass the context to other gadgets
2. How gadgets can harvest data in various formats (in my previous post I explained on how to get data from RDF endpoints, which are also available in *.gov.uk sites)

The building blocks for the implementation was the search url, which was quite straight forward. for all the requests based on postal codes the direct.gov site served in the same manner (because of this important fact, the automation process became trivial). for an instance the url for primary school information retrial was,

http://local.direct.gov.uk/LDGRedirect/LocationSearch.do?LGSL=13&searchtype=1&LGIL=8&Style=&formsub=t&text=SE1+7DU

Where the param “text” changed according to the postal code. So far everything seemed straight forward, however at implementation, while using Gadgets API for content retrial, I faced problems in parsing text with javascript. Hence the gadgets.io.makeRequest supported HTML as text and the API method returned the retrieved HTML document as string making it quite impossible to process.

With some thinking and advise, I brought the Mashup Server in to the picture and used it to retrieve the data from the gov site and returned the result in XML format. Using the Mashup Server web scraping seems to be a piece of cake, We created a simple mashup using the scraper host-object and captured the result set in the search result page. The mashup code as follows,

function search(searchUrl) {
	var scraper = new Scraper(
		
		    {searchUrl}
			
			    
				
				   
				
			     
			
		
	);
	return new XMLList(scraper.response);
}

And finally the two gadgets were making service calls to the mashup service and retrieved the data as an XML object, making the data processing painless. The final version at the Gadget Server looked quite appealing.

Gadget Server look - in the end

Special thanks goes to Ruchira for helping me out with the mashup service You can download the Gadget code and the Mashup service and try the scenario yourself.

I just integrated the facebook’s new like button, there was an easy to use plug-in for wordpress so I didnt have to make any code level changes to my template. So if you guys also thinking of integrating the social feature you might want to read this, this and this.

And for all you people who are too lazy to comment on posts, can now, just click on “like” and give me a heads up

Okey so this is the fun part that I promised to write about . I managed to cook up a use-case to demonstrate RDF querying and making use of the semantic data. The data that I am using for querying, is the rdf data sources available in the UK data.gov site. With some analysis I figured out that this task can be fundamentally archived using the combination of Mashup and Gadget Technologies. My choice of tools were WSO2 Mashup Server and WSO2 Gadget Server for their great flexibility and of cause for other obvious reasons . However the Mashup Server does not natively support RDF data retrieval, hence I had to do some work to get such functionality integrated. The great fact about the mashup server is its extensibility, the concept of host objects and the ability to write custom host objects and its pluggable nature comes handy in such cases. The high level architecture of what I am trying to achieve is as follows.

RDF data retrival with WSO2 Mashup server / WSO2 Gadget Server

To implement the above architecture with the tools at hand I created a custom host object that can be plugged to the Mashup Server. When dealing with semantic web related tasks and RDF data handling HP’s Jena java library comes in handy. With the use of Jena-ARQ (for SPARQL) api I managed to get the host object working with few lines of code.

.....
            Dataset dataSet = DatasetFactory.create(sparqlObject.rdfDataSource);
            // Create a new query form a given user query
            String queryString = sparqlObject.spaqrlQuery;
            Query query = QueryFactory.create(queryString);
            QueryExecution qe = QueryExecutionFactory.create(query, dataSet);
            ResultSet results = qe.execSelect();
.....
           resultString = ResultSetFormatter.asXMLString(results);
..... OR.....
           ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
           ResultSetFormatter.outputAsJSON(bos, results);

With the host object in place, the next task was to create a Mashup in-order to query the rdf data with a given source (EndPoint or data source). The javascript service (Mashup) is created to serve this purpose, where the consumer can specify the RDF endpoint or the data source with the SPARQL query and retrieve the dataset in XML or JSON.

.....
function RdfDocQueryService(rdfDataSource, rdfQuery, resultType) {
   var sparqlObj = new SparqlHostObject();
   sparqlObj.rdfDataSource = rdfDataSource;
   sparqlObj.spaqrlQuery = rdfQuery;
   sparqlObj.resultType = resultType;
   return new XML(sparqlObj.getDataFromRdfSource());
}

Finally to bind everything together, lets try querying some data. My example usecase is to use the query at N2 blog to retrieve traffic monitoring points in UK roads. The query to retrieve the data set as follows,

#List the uri, latitude and longitude for road traffic monitoring points on the M5
PREFIX road:
PREFIX rdf:
PREFIX geo:
PREFIX wgs84:
PREFIX xsd:
SELECT ?point ?lat ?long WHERE {
  ?x a road:Road.
  ?x road:number "A4"^^xsd:NCName.
  ?x geo:point ?point.
  ?point wgs84:lat ?lat.
  ?point wgs84:long ?long.
}

To visualize these points I have created a gadget with the aid of Google Maps api. This gadget can be hosted in the Gadget Server, where it can dynamically retrieve traffic monitoring points for each road in the UK and display them in the map as follows.

Traffic points in A4 road, UK

For the past week or so I was able to work with data.gov.uk to find a possibility to make use of government/public data for a nice sample gadget, that will work in the Gadget Server. However it is quite disappointing to see most of these data are in lengthy PDF files, and without some expensive processing these data could not be consumed easily. The happy scenarios in my mind was, that there will be a bunch of RESTfull web services where I can request for public data and in return I will get the result set in XML or (and if am really lucky) in JSON

After some browsing over the data in the UK data site, There was one interesting area which is called SPARQL and that was my moment of joy . there were six government data endpoints which I can query against and the result set can be retrieved as XML or JSON. This was the ideal scenario, even the available data is limited, there it starts the story of the Semantic Web.

When I was reading for my bachelor’s thesis, under service orchestration and chirography, the concepts of semantic web (services) were discussed in length. However the idea is still in its early stages, and there is still no real business use-case for it. The very purpose of semantic web is that the resources of the WEB and there relationships can be self explained and explored.

Self Explainable RDF graph

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

– Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

The UK data site has offered chunks of eduction, transport, financial, environmental, analytical and statutory notices as RDF data endpoints which can be queried using SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language).

So why let this great opportunity to lay dry, my idea was simply to use these endpoints and query these data and display them in some gadgets, for instance with transport data we can draw traffic details in maps, or with financial and educational data we can create some graphs and charts.

But with some thought, WHY NOT go for mashing up, We have a great tool (WSO2 Mashup Server) just made for that. So I was cutting code for the past whole week to create a custom host object in the Mashup Server to query RDF (RDF Service endpoints or RDF Data sources) data, and am almost done, the host object is created, two mashup services are created (Query a RDF endpoint/and RDF data source) now its a matter of integrating the services with Google Maps API and visualize them as a gadget in the Gadget Server.

So yeah the good stuff will be in the next post. keep tuned

Yesterday (16th Dec) WSO2 Gadget Server graduated from its beta status and announced its release. WSO2 Gadget Server is designed to serve as a presentation middle-ware product in the SOA space to smoothly display chunks of service oriented data for the end users.

The solution architecture is based on portal / portlet concept but making it far more simpler. Since the enterprises are more and more leaning towards the cloud and service oriented mashups, visualizing those data should not be complicated. Hence the Gadget Server provides a simple platform to write the data visualization code just in HTML, JavaScript and XML the implementation of the presentation logic cannot make more simpler. It is exactly similar to writing a Google gadget (hosted in iGoogle / Gmail / orkut) to Tweet .

As far as it goes the Gadget Server’s applicability for the enterprise is somewhat an enterprise dashboard that can be customized according to the user’s need and governed by the authorities. For an instance if you are a manager of a bank, wouldn’t it be great to have a dashboard forecasting and displaying current and future bank transaction stats and predications, while at the same time in a deferent view having your business schedule, calender, mail/IM, and news as small but clear and interactive portlets.

Yeah so thats, what the Gadget Server does, and the interesting fact is, its simplicity and extensibility, What all you need to know is some HTML and JavaScript. (no need to consult Java / .NET / PHP / SOA experts). So Download it !! Play with it !! Give us some feedback !!

As I have mentioned in some previous post, today I did a talk about Apache shindig and its use cases (WSO2 Gadget Server) at Apache Con 09 with my Colleague Tyrell. So without writing about the whole talk let me share the presentation slides. The Talk turned up great, audience were quite interested, too bad we had very limited time and missed to do a demo.

Today I was at Apache Asia road show 2009 at Colombo, and feeling good about myself of attending . It was a great session with many valuable tech talks and more of a valuable community gathering. Am not writing this post to talk about Apache and all the open source movement but about a specific talk which made me thinking.

Today, the 1st of 3 days event, the keynote speech was given by a remarkable Sri Lankan Scientist Prof Mohan Munasinghe on a topic if I remember correctly, “Making Development More Sustainable Will Help Address Climate Change“. I know !! It doesn’t sound much like open source or rather ICT in that matter, but the way he made most of the things related to ICT was quite remarkable. His solution to address bigger problems seems simple. His solution was to address the small problems, change the things what you can change at no cost, exactly quoting “Use electricity carefully, eat less meet ”.

Thinking it through, its the old method in solving the big problem, its just break it in to small problems and try to solve those small ones. The facts Prof Munasinghe talked about climate change was quite terrifying. But however his conclusion was optimistic, he believed as a community that we will stand up against these challenges, be less greedy and help the poor.

P.S : If anyone of you did find the presentation slides of the keynote speech please do link in comments

Nothing much new to write, was busy with work, WSO2 Gadget Server is about to release in the coming weeks, (I’ll be writing a whole story about it in a coming post). Apart from all those, my first article was published today in the diGIT magazine, which is a free online IT magazine run by a bunch of Sri Lankans. For some time I wanted to write about SOA and my findings in my final academic year, I thought I will blog about it. But never got a chance or rather, who will read about SOA in my blog . For many of such reasons I thought of contributing to diGIT mainly about SOA. With its December issue, my first article about SOA got published. you can check it out at http://digit.lk/09_dec_soa2 and leave a comment here

Other than that, The Apache Asia Roadshow 2009 is happening in town Dec. 3rd, 4th and 5th. On 4th morning I will be talking about Apache Shindig and our experience in WSO2 Gadget Server along with Tyrell. So pay a visit on the event am sure it’ll be awesome.