Introduction to C-Apps

A Carbon Application (C-App) is a collection of artifacts deployable on a WSO2 product instance. These artifacts are usually JAVA-based or XML configurations, designed differently for each product in the WSO2 Carbon platform. You can deploy these artifacts to generate services.

A single WSO2 product can have numerous artifacts such as Axis2 services, dataservices, synapse configurations, endpoints, proxy services, mediators, registry resources, BPEL workflows etc. Usually, these artifacts are created in a development environment and then moved one by one into staging/production environments. Manually configuring artifacts to build up the entire solution this way is a time-consuming task. Instead, you can bundle configuration files and artifacts in a C-App and port Web service based solutions across environments more easily. C-Apps allow you to export your entire solution as a single archive file.

A single C-App can consist of artifacts that are deployable in various different products. Therefore, when you deploy a C-App in a particular WSO2 product, all its artifacts might not be deployed in that particular product instance. To sort out which can be deployed in which, the ServerRole property is used.

Adding the ServerRole property

A server role is a parameter that is mentioned in <PRODUCT_HOME>/repository/conf/carbon.xml file of all WSO2 products. When a C-App is being deployed, it reads the ServerRoles property from the carbon.xml and deploys only the resources that match the server-role value in the file. Each product has a different default ServerRoles property as follows:

• WSO2 Application Server - "ApplicationServer"
• WSO2 Business Activity Monitor - "BusinessActivityMonitor"
• WSO2 Business Process Server - "BusinessProcessServer"
• WSO2 Business Rules Server - "BusinessRulesServer"
• WSO2 Data Services Server - "DataServicesServer"
• WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus - "EnterpriseServiceBus"
• WSO2 Gadget Server - "GadgetServer"
• WSO2 Governance Registry - "GovernanceRegistry"
• WSO2 Identity Server - "IdentityServer"
• WSO2 Mashup Server - "MashupServer"

In C-App development time, you can specify a server role for each and every artifact in the C-App. For example, say you are developing an Axis2 service and planning to deploy all your services in a single Application Server instance in the production setup. You can set the server role as appserver1.

The following methods can be used to set the ServerRole:

Using the management console to set the ServerRole property

This is the easiest and the most recommended way to configure your server roles.   Follow the instructions below to add a new server role:

1. Log in to the management console of your product and  click Server Roles menu under the Configure menu. 
   

   

2. Click Add New Server Role   ,  enter the Role Name and click Add . You can add any textual name as a server role without special characters except underscore.
    

3. The newly added server role is displayed in the server roles list.
    You can delete the server role using the Deleteicon associated with it.

   You cannot undo a deletion once performed. Users can even delete a default server role. Once deleted, the server role manager will not pick up the deleted server role from the carbon.xml file, next time the server starts.

Using carbon.xml file to set the ServerRole property

Find the ServerRoles element in <PRODUCT_HOME>/repository/conf/carbon.xml file. For example,

<ServerRoles>
     <Role>DataServicesServer</Role>
</ServerRoles>

You can set multiple role elements here to specify the roles acted by the current server. For example, if you want this server to act as appserver1 and dataservices1 servers, configuration is as follows:

<ServerRoles>
     <Role>appserver1</Role>
     <Role>dataservices1</Role>
</ServerRoles>

Before setting the above, ensure that the current server has capability to deploy Axis2 services and data services. When you deploy a C-App artifact on this server, all artifacts which have the above two server roles will be deployed on the current instance. Others will be ignored.

Using a system property to set the ServerRole property

You can use the system property ServerRoles to specify the server roles that can be acted by the current product instance. When you start the server, pass the server roles as a comma separated list. For example,

sh wso2server.sh -DserverRoles=appserver1,dataservices1