WSO2 Carbon is based on Java OSGi technology, which allows components to be dynamically installed, started, stopped, updated, and uninstalled while eliminating component version conflicts. In Carbon, this capability translates into a solid core of common middleware components useful across any enterprise project, plus the ability to add components for specific features needed to solve a specific enterprise scenario.
The core set of components in WSO2 Carbon provide WSO2 middleware products with enterprise-class management, security, clustering, logging, statistics, tracing, throttling, caching, and other capabilities as well as a management UI framework. Central to these components is WSO2’s solid and high performance SOA and Web Services engine. Add-in components encapsulate different functionality.
A unified graphical management console can deploy, manage, and view services, processes, process instances, and statistics across the whole platform, comprising of different products. As each runtime component is added, associated management components are added to the UI. With a clean front-end/back-end separation between the UI and the runtime, all capabilities can be controlled through a remote WSO2 Carbon UI, or through a clean Web Services interface.
We use Carbon as the core of our middleware products reflecting familiar middleware product categories. Most users will start with one of these categories with the assurance that components can be added/removed to facilitate changing business requirements.