As defined by the Integration Consortium, an ESB is a neutral, standards-based integration solution that is flexible, robust, scalable, and at the same time, easy to implement and maintain. ESBs are said to help enable application and systems integration based on open web services standards, and are seen by many as pivotal in the roll-out of service oriented architectures (SOAs).

Dublin, Ireland headquartered Iona – best known for its Corba environment Orbix – launched version 3.0 of its so-called Extensible ESB, Artix, in March this year. But now the company has announced Celtix, a project that will see it donating some code from Artix to the open source movement, in the hope of commoditizing the low end of the ESB market and ultimately upgrading Celtix users to its Artix platform.

The project will be hosted by the ObjectWeb Consortium, a not-for-profit open source group. In an interview with ComputerWire, Iona’s chief scientist Sean Baker said that Iona is the sponsor of the project but that other contributors are welcome, even rival ESB companies.

However there are no other confirmed contributors at this stage. Speaking to ComputerWire, rival ESB player CapeClear’s David Clarke, VP of products, said: We see this as a knee-jerk reaction to the assumption that because there is an open source application server (JBoss) there is a market for an open source ESB, but we see them as very different markets.

We see demand for ESBs including them being easy to use, easy to test and interoperate, continued Clarke. ESB customers are rarely ultra-techie users. All of these things that people want from ESBs are not something normally associated with open source projects. It is unlikely we will contribute to this project.

Other rivals including Polar Lake and Software were unable to respond to a request for comment in the short time available before we went to press yesterday.

Meanwhile, according to Baker, Iona is not donating the sum of its Artix ESB code to the open source community. Celtix is an ESB at the basic level, this is something much lighter weight than Artix, he said. With Celtix we want to address the straightforward requirements of an ESB, and besides, with Artix we have strong license revenue to maintain.

Specifically, Baker said that Celtix will be a Java-based ESB. Artix, on the other hand, is able to integrate with Java as well as Corba, MOM-based systems, home grown and other legacy systems, as well as the mainframe. We don’t envisage that Celtix is going to integrate with the mainframe, said Iona’s Baker.

Baker explained that Celtix will be released under a GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), with the first version likely to be ready by the fourth quarter of this year. The LGPL license means that users and other vendors are free to embed the software in their own products, but if they make any enhancements to the core Celtix then they must donate those enhancements back to the project.

ObjectWeb first began talking about wanting to kick-start an open source ESB project in June last year at JavaOne in San Francisco. The plans were discussed again in October last year, but no-one stepped forward at that time to sponsor a project.

Speaking to ComputerWire yesterday, ObjectWeb spokesperson Francois Letellier said that there is likely to be at least one other contributor to Celtix, but he could not name them yet. He also said that Celtix would not necessarily be the only open source ESB project hosted by ObjectWeb. For example other projects might be related to non-Java ESBs, or ESB tooling, or ESB adapters.

As for Celtix, part of its core functionality will be support for the recently introduced Java Business Integration (JBI) specification developed within the Java Community Process (JCP). JBI defines a standard container in which components from multiple vendors and various integration technologies can interact.

The initial release of Celtix will also include WSDL contract language support for defining services, standard transports including WS-RM, JMS and HTTP, binding support for SOAP and XML payloads and application bindings for Java and POJO, according to Iona. Celtix will also feature Eclipse-based administration and configuration tools and basic security support.