ObjectWeb is an open not-for-profit consortium of leading companies from around the world who have joined forces to create open-source, standard-based solutions for middleware and distributed software infrastructures.

The ObjectWeb Consortium

Founded in 2002 by France Telecom, Bull and INRIA, ObjectWeb is an open consortium of companies and research organizations from around the world who join forces to create open-source, standard-based solutions for middleware and distributed software infrastructures.

ObjectWeb’s rationale is to help the open-source middleware ecosystem grow and, in return, let ecosystem growth bring new opportunities to users and vendors. These latter may complement open-source components with their own commercial added value, in the form of software or professional services.

Recommending open standards, ObjectWeb delivers open-source middleware components of enterprise class addressing business integration, SOA/EDA, pervasive and mobile computing, application scalability, software engineering and more.

The community around ObjectWeb is growing fast on all continents. Organized with business needs in mind, he consortium is a unique meeting place for experts, researchers, developers and users. You’re welcome to join in – on the user or developer side – and start taking part in the ecosystem.

Enterprise Ready Open Source

ObjectWeb makes sure that developments are performed by professional teams, appointed by industrial leaders. Project leaders and coopted experts meet in the College of Architects, which oversees the coherence, quality and durability of the code base.

Building software infrastructure on standard-based technologies is pivotal to the enterprise sustainability. In order to ensure maximum interoperability, projects comply to existing open standards whenever possible.

Open-source allows companies, from small to global, to evaluate components without commitment, at minimum cost. Once qualified, components and platforms can be used for development purposes and pilot experiments. Commoditized open-source components allow ROI optimization and risk containment when scaling up to full production.

The business-neutral and non-profit status of the ObjectWeb consortium ensures the independence of all project teams. Thanks to the open-source licensing pattern, users can freely take on ObjectWeb software, which is fully documented, change for other solutions from other vendors, or choose a strategy of alternative sourcing.

Although ObjectWeb does not provide services, corporate members of the consortium offer the professional services needed to make your open-source middleware project a success: consulting, training, support, maintenance, customization and even open or proprietary packaged solutions. And, while members are in the best position to be experts on ObjectWeb solutions, users remain free to choose other partners.

Components for Software Infrastructures

The ObjectWeb community develops an ever-growing set of solutions addressing business integration and SOA. Production-ready platforms provide reliable message bus, ETL, EAI, web services and workflow tools to connect and coordinate new or legacy applications across the enterprise.

JOnAS, a full open-source implementation of J2EE™ 1.4 (currently undergoing certification), is ObjectWeb’s flagship application server, used in production by global companies for e-business, e-government, e-learning. JOnAS also serves as the core of new versions of Enhydra, arguably the open-source Java™/XML application server with the longest track record in software history.

From “smart dust” to mobile phones, to digital assistants, to home service gateways, to appliances and workstations, pervasive computing becomes a reality. ObjectWeb works on specific frameworks ranging from resource optimization to data synchronization. Some integration solutions provide low footprint connectors targeted to lightweight devices.

Real-time enterprises today are more demanding than ever with application QoS. Universities and research labs in the ObjectWeb community have teams working on scalability and systems dependability. Using ObjectWeb as a dissemination channel for their results, they contribute to projects addressing clustering and grid computing for high availability, high performance and scalability.

Involving research teams and industry experts, ObjectWeb developers work on a toolbox of more than 50 packages offering multi-protocol ORBs, object-relational mapping, transaction management, connection pooling, data persistence, rich-client frameworks, benchmarking and more. These packages are ready to use for rapid development and can be freely extended or customized to meet specific requirements of the most demanding architects. Eclipse plug-ins, part of the Eclipse WebTools project, address J2EE / web development.

ObjectWeb is today well equipped to deliver the foundations of open-source ESB solutions, with integration components proven in production. The consortium just started an ESB Initiative. It will be a federative place to find tactical solutions to integration issues, let real world business cases drive the evolution of ObjectWeb code base, complement it with tools from other communities and eventually, let vendors market highly competitive integration suites.

The recent extension of ObjectWeb's code base with 3 components for portal, content and business process management makes the consortium's set of commercial grade middleware projects an unrivalled roster in the open-source world.

In addition, quarterly meetings dedicated to architecture are organized to deal with the technical management of projects.