Early last week Iona announced it was sponsoring the open source project, and donating some of the code from its own Artix ESB in the hope of having an open source ESB ready by the fourth quarter of this year. Iona’s chief scientist Sean Baker said the motivation for the project was to commoditize the low end of the ESB market, and in so-doing help to drive the adoption of ESBs.
Celtix is not the first open source ESB project, an open source ESB called Mule hosted by another open-source project repository called Codehaus is already on version 1.1.
While Iona’s Baker said other contributors were welcome to join in on the Celtix project, ComputerWire has been unable to find a single ESB vendor that says it will back it. CapeClear, Polar Lake, and Fiorano Software all said they would not contribute, while Sonic Software – the inventor of the ESB concept – said it was undecided.
But while ObjectWeb said it was trying to match-make like-minded vendors to participate in the project, it said that it would not matter if Iona is the only vendor contributing. My feeling is that you’re not looking for contributors in the right direction, said ObjectWeb spokesperson Francois Letellier, hinting that large end-user organizations, ISVs, or individual programmers might collaborate on the project instead.
Explaining the motivation for the project from ObjectWeb’s perspective, Letellier added: Business integration is to become commodity in the coming years. Open standards are maturing. The market is fragmented today, which is at the same time an opportunity for regional players to launch open-source based offerings. When looking for contributions, you should think modularity, and also look for synergies between Celtix and complementary projects.
Letellier said there could be other projects in the area of services-based integration hosted by ObjectWeb that could complement Celtix. The first deliverable of the Celtix project is expected to be ready by the fourth quarter this year, an ambitious schedule if Iona is planning on accepting contributions and changes from other interested parties, whether vendors, ISVs, end users, or individual programmers.
But commenting on the launch of Celtix, Iona CEO Peter Zotto said: ObjectWeb is the perfect community for an open source ESB project because of its successful track record in open source middleware projects. Hosting Celtix with ObjectWeb gives us great confidence in the community’s ability to bring to market an open source Java ESB project that best meets both business needs and the needs of the developer community.
