Carbon is the server foundation based on OSGi. It handles common capabilities like user management, transports, security, logging, clustering, caching and throttling. All WSO2 products are sets of components running on top of this core framework.
So the standalone products available for download are made up like this..
- WSO2 Carbon + Service Hosting Related components = WSO2 Application
Server
- WSO2 Carbon + Mediation/Proxy related components = WSO2 ESB
- WSO2 Carbon + SOA Governance Related components = WSO2 Governence
Registry
- WSO2 Carbon + BPEL compoents = WSO2 Business Process Server
This illustration will help you to understand the capabilities of the whole platform.
To make things more interesting, since this modular archtecture is based on OSGi you can mix and match componets to suit your requirements. For example, if you want to add BPEL support to the WSO2 ESB, simply install the BPEL component into your existing WSO2 ESB.
WSO2 Carbon Studio (recently renamed to Developer Studio) is the Eclipse-Based IDE that helps you with the creation of artifacts with graphical editors, test and debug them within the IDE, and helps deploy them as Carbon Archives (.car) on to your WSO2 Carbon-based servers or onto a WSO2 Stratos-based cloud.
This blog describes how to deploy a Hello World service in WSO2 application server.
This is an advanced sample that uses carbon studio for development and deployment.