Red Hat's JBoss division is releasing an essential element for Service-Oriented Architecture integration with legacy applications.
Red Hat’s JBoss division is releasing an essential element for Service-Oriented Architecture integration with legacy applications.
Marc Fleury, senior vice president and general manager of the JBoss division of Red Hat, was scheduled to open the JBoss World 3 day regional user conference and exposition in Berlin today with several announcements, the most critical of which was the release of JBoss ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), which adds an essential building block for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) integration to the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS).
JBoss is presenting its open source stack for SOA as a new approach for enterprise IT to tackle raodblocks in the infrastructure. Open source SOA gives added agility, “transforms proprietary and rigid infrastructures into open standards”, requires new ways of thinking, and promises drastic savings for the enterprise, the company says.
An ESB is integral to SOA, facilitating interaction between enterprise applications, business services, business components, and middleware to integrate and automate business processes. SOA is notoriously difficult to define but the simplest analogy is the application of web services to data flows and computer processes inside an organisation, as well as outside. Too often companies have a jumble of data and processes collected by different departments, and an array of computer systems that behave differently to one another. Service-oriented architecture aims to loosely couple these disparate systems and networks of processes and data, and look for ways that a company can share its services across the organisation and with partners and suppliers in a meaningful way.
The Enterprise Service Bus is an essential element in providing integrated SOA solutions for legacy applications running on disparate architectures. The objective of an ESB is to simplify and centralize traditional point-to-point software interfaces and allow legacy in-house and partner software systems to share information more quickly, easily, and cost-effectively.
JBoss ESB is based on the Rosetta ESB, which was originally developed under the auspices of Aviva Canada, the second largest insurance provider in Canada employing about 3,000 employees. It was donated to JBoss and the JBoss open source community as a means of diversifying development, speeding up adoption of SOA, and providing enhanced integration of ESB into JEMS.
An alpha version of JBoss ESB was released in March, shortly after the acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat. Mark Little, director of standards and development manager for the Transactions and ESB projects for JBoss, wrote in his blog at the time, “We’ve had great feedback from community developers, partners and prospective customers, all of them endorsing the approach we’re taking… However, the one thing that we were having difficulty on was keeping up with interest and demand: everyone wants JBoss ESB yesterday.”
Although Rosetta had been deployed in production environments for over 3 years, and handled “tens of thousands of real-time and batch processing events from legacy and J2EE applications, insurance underwriting and real-time quote requests,” Little observed that “Rosetta doesn’t match the architecture the ESB team have been working on, (but) it is close enough that with concerted effort we’ll soon be in a position to provide a production-ready version of JBoss ESB,” which has been achieved in a matter of months.
Rosetta brought to JBoss ESB: “support for a variety of messaging services, including JBossMQ and MQSeries; a transformation engine to bridge data formats; a service registry; a persisted event repository to support governance of the ESB environment; a base transport mechanism; pluggable architecture; and a notification service to allow the ESB to register events and signal subscribers. All of this in a product that has been running continuously for 3 years: a pedigree and level of trust that is difficult to find elsewhere in this new and emerging market.”
At the same time Little announced that Esteban Schifman, the Chief Architect at Heuristica and part of the team that developed Rosetta, had joined the JBoss ESB team.
JBoss has made rapid advances in Europe with JEMS, driven by a maturing portfolio of JEMS products and the growing enterprise adoption of open source software, led by JBoss and Compiere, the open source ERP and CRM software company. JBoss has been leading the way in the development of tools for SOA, and with the addition of JBoss ESB to its arsenal, Red Hat can claim to provide the enterprise with an integrated set of low cost SOA building blocks for modern applications and the ability to run them on a virtualised Linux platform.
In addition, JBoss is unveiling key features of its forthcoming Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (EE) 5.0 compliant application server, at the conference. JBoss Application Server is the most widely used Java application server on the market. The forthcoming release will provide significantly enhanced platform services such as clustering, messaging, and web services. JBoss World Berlin 2006 is intended to bring together JBoss users, partners and developers in Europe, and includes presentations; a Red Hat Forum; a Service Oriented Architecture track featuring best practices and real-world case studies; an executive series focused on the business of open source; and a laptop workshop series designed to give developers hands-on experience with the latest and greatest JBoss offerings, including JBoss Seam, JBoss ESB, and JBoss Rules.
JBoss claims record growth in customer adoption in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, (EMEA) with a year-to-date revenue increase for 2006 of 42 percent, and has also grown its EMEA partnership base by 240 percent, which is indicative of the growing acceptance and promotion of open source solutions in the enterprise.
“From the beginning, EMEA has been a crucial market for JBoss,” said Fleury. “It’s where we’ve found some of our earliest adopters and many of our key technical leads. The EMEA community has played a key role in the JBoss success story. Now, we’re taking our success to another level with the benefit of Red Hat’s footprint in this region.”
