Behind most application silos are heterogeneous data stores. Most businesses require secure and managed data access across these federated data stores, data service transactions, and data transformation and validation.
The WSO2 Data Services Server augments Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) development efforts by providing a simple, easy-to-use platform for integrating data stores, creating composite data views, and hosting data in disparate sources as WS-* style Web services or REST-style Web resources. Data services provide unprecedented data access and straightforward integration with business processes, mashups, gadgets, business intelligence and mobile applications.
The WSO2 Data Services Server is enterprise-ready, lean, 100% open source, cloud-enabled and multi-tenanted delivered with Apache license 2.0, one of the most business-friendly licenses available today. It is built on top of the award-winning WSO2 Carbon platform and inherits its cutting edge middleware capabilities.
The WSO2 Data Services Server is an on-going project. It undergoes continuous improvements and enhancements with each new release, to address new business challenges and customer expectations. WSO2 invites users, developers and enthusiasts to get involved or get the assistance from our development teams at many different levels through online forums, mailing lists and support options. We are committed to ensure you a fulfilling user experience at any level of involvement with the WSO2 Data Services Server.
Introduction to data services
Data Services offer a convenient mechanism to configure a Web service interface for data stored in data sources. Data sources such as relational databases, CSV files, Microsoft Excel sheets, Google spread sheets etc. can be easily service-enabled using the data services feature. This data can be exposed and accessed in a secured (using WS-Security) and reliable (using WS-ReliableMessaging) manner, and is also available for mash-up with other Web services.
The data services management functionality is offered by the following feature in the WSO2 feature repository:
Name: Data Service Hosting Feature
Identifier: org.wso2.carbon.dataservices.feature.group
There are several other features bundled in the above feature to enable service management, service dashboard, data service deployment, task scheduling and other related capabilities. The Data Service Hosting feature is bundled in all service management WSO2 products by default. If the product you are using does not have this feature by default, you can install it by following the instructions given in section Feature Management.
A data service is also a typical web service, with specialized functionality.