ObjectWeb, the international not-for-profit consortium dedicated to
open-source infrastructure software, announced that its initiative to federate
development of open-source components for Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
solutions is gaining attention from big names in the industry.
ObjectWeb ESB Initiative is a market-driven process intended to let commercial
vendors build offerings relating to ESB and based on open-source software. Its
goal is to help the open-source middleware ecosystem grow and, in return, to
leverage the ecosystem growth to bring new opportunities to users and vendors.
These latter may complement open-source commodity components with their own
commercial added-value offering, under the form of software or professional
services:
- Market driven
- The ESB Initiative is started to complement open-source development
with a market-/user-driven process. Technical decisions will be taken
based on real world, short term user requirements expressed under the
form of business cases.
- Iterative
- The initiative starts with existing components and will match new
developments with user expectations in an incremental way, so to
deliver value as soon as possible.
- Targeting ecosystem growth
- The goal is to deliver a toolbox of components that commercial
vendors may complement with their own added value in the form of
additional software and/or professional services,
- Industry attention
- Industry and software heavyweights already expressed their interest
in the initiative: Dassault Aviation, Capgemini, Software AG, Sonic
Software and other companies that are about to join ObjectWeb.
- Federative
- The consortium is open to all member companies that want to support
the initiative. ObjectWeb will invite other open-source/free software
communities and projects to join in this initiative.
Announced in June, the ESB initiative was officially kicked off on Oct. 4 in
Capgemini's offices, Paris-La-Defense, France.
ObjectWeb Chairman Jean-Pierre Laisne explained: "In the concept of ESB,
service is a functional notion, not a technical requirement. An ESB is not
only a new way to exchange messages, but actually an enabling technology that
permits to develop and publish enterprise services, in the business sense of
the word service. This concept is still in its early years with a variety of
visions and some standards still to be defined. Our goal is not to design a
single ObjectWeb ESB. Our goal is to be the focal point where ESB solutions
based on open-source software are designed in a professional fashion, driven
by real world user needs."
Speakers from Dassault Aviation, Capgemini, Sonic Software and SoftwareAG
presented typical user requirements during the morning session of the kick-off
day.
Mickael Remond, open source product manager at Capgemini, said: "Our
short-term expectation from open-source solutions such as ObjectWeb's is an
increase in productivity for our development teams. To achieve this goal,
Capgemini will contribute to the ESB Initiative by providing valuable use
cases and real life feedback regarding our Objectweb components experience. "
Jonathan Airey, vice president of XML business integration at Software AG,
said: "During the last years more and more of our customers embraced the
concept of a Service Oriented Architecture, moving towards standards based
ways of Integration. Integration and Mediation of these Services is what the
Enterprise Service Bus does, making it the vital part for any SOA and an
attractive alternative to classical EAI approaches. We see a good future and
adoption rate for ESB in the future, especially in conjunction with open
source initiatives like ObjectWeb. They enhance the usability of any modern
architecture tremendously."
Florent Lefevre, sales manager of Sonic Software, said: "An ESB can be seen as
a SOA oriented, programmatic integration platform. The key drivers for the
adoption of such technologies are pragmatism, flexibility, modularity, ease of
deployment onto multiple sites and compliance to standards."
Speakers from ObjectWeb corporate members gave an overview of existing
integration-oriented components and platforms that already meet some major
user requirements in the field of integration. ObjectWeb components targeting
application integration include the following:
- JOnAS -- Java application server currently undergoing certification of
compliance with J2EE 1.4.
- MOBE (MidOffice BPEL Engine) -- the first open-sourced BPEL orchestration
engine.
- Bonita, Shark, JaWE -- WfMC workflow engines and tools.
- JORAM -- message-oriented middleware with JMS and SOAP connectors.
- JOTM -- distributed transaction manager.
- XQuark -- XML/XQuery data integration and transformation engine.
- ActiveXML -- framework for embedding service calls in XML documents.
- Enhydra Octopus -- ETL tool.
Roland Balter, CSO of ScalAgent and ObjectWeb Board member, said: "ObjectWeb
is today well equipped to deliver the foundations of open-source ESB
solutions, with integration components proven in production. The ESB
initiative will be a federative place to find tactical solutions to
integration issues, let real world business cases drive the evolution of
ObjectWeb code base, complement it with tools from other communities and
eventually, let vendors like ScalAgent market highly competitive integration
suites."
