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Secure Your WSO2 Micro Integrator Deployment

WSO2 Micro Integrator (for short, let's use MI) is an integration solution that is widely used in enterprise integration. You can use MI  to implement mediation policies, message transformation, security, and more. In this article, we are going to focus on how you can securely place MI on your deployment.

First Things First

WSO2 MI comes with a default keystore that is used in many cryptography-related features including SSL, mutual SSL, and password encryption. Since this is a public one, you should make sure that you have generated a new keystore and truststore for the MI.

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Introduction to the Circuit Breaker Pattern

Consider that you’re running a web service that requires input and delivers it to another backend service. If the backend service is not available for some time, then what kind of fail-proof system should you implement? This is where the Circuit Breaker design pattern comes in.

Let’s think about a situation where a request goes to a middleware application and you need to call another remote backend service. If everything goes fine and smooth, the application can forward the request to the backend service and send the response back to the client. But, if the backend service was down, the request could not be completed. The next few requests from the client also try to call the backend service and fail. Here, we can use the Circuit Breaker model to manage backend errors. According to the Circuit Breaker pattern, the middleware may be in the following possible states.

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How Database B-Tree Indexing Works

When we think about the performance of a database, indexing is the first thing that comes to the mind. Here, we are going to look into how database indexing works on a database. Please note that here, architectural details are described referenced to SQLite 2.x database architecture. You can find out the backend implementation of SQLite 2.5.0 with tests, which is relevant to this post from https://github.com/madushadhanushka/simple-sqlite.

Read how overall SQLite database architecture composed in this DZone article.

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Introduction to Ballerina: Language of Integration

Ballerina language

There are more than a thousand programming languages out there. Why do you need another programming language? Ballerina language intended to simplify the particular programming domain known as integration. You may be a developer who develops different kinds of web services and intends to interconnect those services. Then the Ballerina language will be your next programming companion.

You may also like:  Developing Ballerina Project With Ballerina CLI Tool

This post is intended to give you an introduction to Ballerina, a flexible, powerful and beautiful programming language that helps you implement any sort of integration requirements. You can download and install Ballerina from the official Ballerinalang website.

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Internal Architecture of the SQLite Database

In a computer program, the database is the heart of handling data and provides a fast and efficient way of storing and retrieving data. Learning the database's internal architecture and looking into a fully featured database at the code level is not so easy because of the database's complexity. But SQLite is a nice little compact database that is used in millions of devices and operating systems. An interesting fact about the SQLite database is that its code base is highly readable. Most of the code is well commented, and the overall software architecture is highly layered. My previous article describes the backend implementation of the SQLite Database, while this article looks into how the SQLite compiler and the VM work at a high level.

As I mentioned earlier, SQLite has a highly layered architecture that can be separated into seven layers. We will go through each of the layers one-by-one.

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Transparent Data Encryption for Databases


The database is the heart of handling data in a software application. Unless it is not an in-memory database, the database stores data on the disk as a file. Your application may be running on a remote server, and the database also resides on a remote server. Your application may collect sensitive data such as passwords, bank account data, health data, etc. The databases that persist data in a disk use a file to store data of a database. Imagine a hacker login into your database server and stolen your database file. Now, unfortunately, a hacker is able to access all of your information by reading that file. So, how could you overcome this problem?

Hide Data With Encryption

Encryption is commonly used in day-to-day network communication to hide data from the third party. Encryption scrambles your data by a given key. Only the person who knows the right key can read the real message. Encryption could be either symmetric or asymmetric. In this case, we just need symmetric encryption since the user does not need to generate a shared secret.