WebProNews

IONA Technologies is planning to make available an open source Java Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), the company announced Monday.

The project, named Celtix, will be hosted by ObjectWeb, an open source community that focuses on development of industry-grade distributed middleware.

"After years of failed promises and inflated expectations from EAI, it is clear customers want to move away from expensive, proprietary, and server-based integration approaches. Our customers embrace ESB technology to solve integration problems using distributed architectures built on open standards," said IONA CEO Peter Zotto.

According to a press release, IONA expects the community to deliver an initial release of Celtix by the end of 2005, providing the industry with an open source Java ESB that can help drive adoption of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based projects and promote the incremental adoption of this computing methodology in the enterprise. Martin LaMonica of CNET News writes:

Several different back-end middleware providers are converging on ESBs and standards-based integration. IBM and BEA Systems have voiced ESB plans, while smaller vendors, including CapeClear, Sonic Software and Fiorano, have had products for a few years.

Messaging "plumbing," such as ESBs, which deliver XML documents between programs using Internet protocols, are considered an important infrastructure component to service-oriented architectures.

"Promoting the adoption of easily available ESB technology broadens the range of companies able to apply the advantages of modern SOA solutions to the most pressing IT problems," said Zotto. "Further, we believe that open source software will be a major accelerator for the adoption and evolution of ESB technology. IONA's heritage in distributed computing allows us to take the lead in this industry trend, which is the foundation for the Celtix project. 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," he said.

"As a member of the ObjectWeb consortium, IONA will introduce an open source Java ESB that delivers the core functionality required to begin deploying SOA in the enterprise," continued Zotto. "Part of that core functionality in Celtix 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, significantly increasing end user choice, flexibility and extensibility while at the same time allowing them to avoid vendor lock-in and lower total cost of ownership.

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, will all be included in the initial release of Celtix. IONA says that It will also feature Eclipse-based administration and configuration tools and basic security support.

Chris is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.