Sun last week announced it is working on what it hopes will become the first open source ESB to support the Sun Java Business Integration, JBI, framework standard, which is spearheaded by Sun and the Java Community Process. JBI defines a standard container in which components from multiple vendors and various integration technologies can interact. Version 1.0 of Sun’s Java ESB is expected this summer.
Just a few days earlier, the ObjectWeb Consortium had announced a similar open source ESB project called Celtix sponsored by Iona, also with the goal of supporting JBI, and hoped to be ready by the fourth quarter of this year.
Commenting on the news from Sun in an interview with ComputerWire, Iona Technologies’ chief scientist Sean Baker said: We encourage Sun to join the ObjectWeb Consortium, where many other developers, vendors and users have already come together to help accelerate the market adoption and evolution of SOA and ESB related technologies.
The ObjectWeb model of delivering standards based SOA infrastructure technology via the open source community is well established, Baker continued. We are committing our resources and name to this project because we believe that this model will drive the adoption of SOA projects.
Meanwhile, Francois Letellier, member of the ObjectWeb Executive Committee, told ComputerWire: It’s hard for a commercial organization [like Sun] to host open source projects without running into conflicts of interests with potential contributors, that may at the same time be competitors. What makes ObjectWeb special is the balance between business awareness and vendor neutrality. Celtix is open to all contributors, individuals, business, or academia, and ObjectWeb is open to Java and non-Java projects.
ObjectWeb was an open source software community created at the end of 1999 by Bull, France Telecom R&D and INRIA – the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control. In 2002 it evolved into an international consortium hosted by INRIA. Its goal is the development of open-source distributed middleware in the form of flexible and adaptable components. The consortium is an independent non-profit organization open to companies, institutions, and individuals.
Neither Celtix nor Sun’s Java ESB are the first open source ESB projects. An open source ESB called Mule, hosted by another open-source project repository called Codehaus, is already on version 1.1, though it doesn’t yet support JBI. However, Ross Mason, a senior developer and member of the Mule project team said on a recent bulletin board posting: [JBI support] is certainly something high on our agenda to investigate. Neither Codehaus nor Sun could be reached for comment by press time.
