The new version of Zato - the open-source middleware platform and backend application server - has just been released.

https://zato.io/docs

Release 2.0 brings dozens of interesting features building on and greatly enriching already existing capabilities.

Major features include:

• A Dockerfile to install a fully-operational cluster of 2 servers, load-balancer and web-admin in 10 minutes
• New connection types: Cloud Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift, Cassandra CQL, Solr, ElasticSearch, Odoo/OpenERP, SMTP and IMAP
• Redis-based REST publish/subscribe
• REST services, channels, outgoing connections and a helper JSON adapter
• HTTP GUI Audit Log for requests and responses
• Asynchronous integration patterns: fan-out/fan-in, parallel execution and invoke/retry
• SQL and OpenStack Swift notifications
• New security mechanisms: RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), SSL/TLS, OAuth, API Keys, XPath-based, NTLM, Amazon AWS
• Re-usable JSON Pointer and XPath expressions
• New Suds-based SOAP connections
• Redis HA with Sentinels
• Distributed locks
• Framework for API testing (zato-apitest - API Testing for Humans)
• rc.d scripts and systemd integration
• New SimpleIO data types: CSV, Dict, Float, List, ListOfDicts, Opaque
• HTML responses with Django templates
• Bash completion

The changelog lists all the updates that are in addition to what Zato has had since the initial release: clustering, scheduling, hot-deployment, GUI, CLI, statistics, Plain HTTP, SOAP, AMQP, FTP(S), JMS WebSphere MQ, ZeroMQ and more.

Check out the no-nonsense introduction to ESB/SOA for an introduction to the philosophy behind the project and just have a look at the following sample screenshots depicting but a small part of the platform in action:

The upcoming release 2.0 of Zato - ESB and application server in Python for SOA, REST, APIs and cloud integrations - will feature means to connect to Redis High Availability (HA) environments with entinels.

While meant for Zato users mostly, the chapter on configuring a minimal Redis HA environment with sentinels can be interesting for a wider audience as well.

Have fun!

Summary: zato-apitest, a newly released tool lets everyone test their APIs in a human-friendly way, in plain English, with no programming needed. Plenty of features out of the box, built-in demo mode, screenshots and heaps of documentation await on GitHub.

Installation:

$ sudo pip install zato-apitest

Here's a screenshot of a demo executed with apitest demo running against a live test server:

What it can do:

• Invoke HTTP APIs

• Use JSON Pointers or XPath to set request's elements to strings, integers, floats, lists, random ones from a set of values, random strings, dates now/random/before/after/between.

• Check that JSON and XML elements, exist, don't exist, that an element is an integer, float, list, empty, non-empty, that it belongs to a list or doesn't.

• Set custom HTTP headers, user agent strings, method and SOAP action.

• Check that HTTP headers are or are not of expected value, that a header exists or not, contains a value or not, is empty or not, starts with a value or not and ends with a value or not.

• Read configuration from environment and config files.

• Store values extracted out of previous steps for use in subsequent steps, i.e. get a list of objects, pick ID of the first one and use this ID in later steps.

• Be integrated with JUnit

• Be very easily extended in Python

Note that zato-apitest is meant to test APIs only. It's doesn't simulate a browser nor any sort of user interactions. It's meant purely for machine-machine API testing.

Originally part of Zato - open-source ESB, SOA, REST, APIs and cloud integrations in Python.

In addition to HTTP Zato itself supports AMQP, ZeroMQ, WebSphere MQ, including JMS, Redis, FTP, OpenERP, SMTP, IMAP, SQL, Amazon S3, OpenStack Swift and more so it's guaranteed zato-apitest will grow support for more protocols and transport layers with time.

More details on GitHub.

Now, is that cool or is that cool? :-)

Article presenting how OpenStack notifications in Zato can be consumed and configured with no programming needed.

Whereas the previous instalment focused on sending messages out to OpenStack-based systems, the current one describes how to receive information placed in OpenStack containers.

As it happens, it's only a matter of creating a connection, filling out a form and pressing OK, as below:

Here is what just happened after clicking OK:

• A background asynchronous task has been started to monitor a set of OpenStack containers each 5 seconds
• Any objects found matching, or not, the name pattern are taken into account for further processing
• A service of one's choice will be invoked each time an object is taken off a container
• The service will receive the contents of this object if the latter's name matches, or not, a certain pattern

And that's it, no programming is needed. Naturally, a piece of code is needed to accept the data each object holds but this is nothing OpenStack-specific. For instance, a basic service that logs everything it receives may look like:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from __future__ import absolute_import, division, print_function, unicode_literals

# Zato
from zato.server.service import Service

class ProcessNewAccounts(Service):
    def handle(self):
        self.log_input()

New on GitHub, Zato HTTP audit log allows you to store requests and responses, along with their headers in a database that can be queried at any time.

Recognizing that certain parts of messages should never be stored anywhere because of their sensitive nature, one can also specify JSON Pointers or XPath expressions indicating which elements in a message should be masked out - for instance, user passwords and social security numbers don't necessarily belong in the audit log.

The database can be asked to return only those items that match a given criteria, for instance - a correlation ID or a value of a header.

As always with each feature, audit log comes with both REST and SOAP APIs to facilitate the creation of interesting supplementary tools on top of what is available by default.