« What is the true meaning of an ESB? | Main | Wham BAM »

In his blog Steve Vinoski of IONA correctly states that “Unfortunately the term ‘ESB’ is not at all clear. For some, it implies the centralized entity. … It's just EAI all over again.” blog. He goes on to say that Artix is an ESB, but “it's about as far from a centralized ESB as you can get.” IONA calls it an extensible ESB.

IONA delivers this extensibility through its adapter run time technology, which allows a CORBA service to be implemented by configuring a metadata-driven profile, thereby enabling new services to be configured dynamically. Different transformation engines, management frameworks, orchestration or BPM solutions, can easily be plugged into the ESB to extend functionality.

IONA is offering two ends of the ESB spectrum – a high performance solution and an open source solution. Artix is being positioned as a high-end, high-performance, high-availability ESB which includes load balancing and security. Artix ESB is aimed at high-end mission critical environments. It now also runs on the mainframe. The Artix ESB can expose COBOL copybooks, PL1, CICS and IMS as WSDL interfaces. It can also go the other way. It can be used to develop the Web services and then generate the COBOL copybooks.

IONA recently introduced the Celtix Open Source ESB. Celtix is a base level, 100% Java ESB. So far thousands of developers have downloaded Celtix, and there are a few developers now contributing code. Celtix is being hosted by the ObjectWeb community (www.objectweb.org). IONA is planning code drops every six weeks. For SOA tooling, IONA is planning facilities for configuring the ESB at design time and dynamically making changes at run time to the end points. The IONA tools are Eclipse-based, making it a totally open solution.

Open source is clearly becoming important to IONA’s strategy. Of course IONA then plans to sell plug-ins to the ESB for different transports, security, high availability, and transaction monitoring, as well as maintenance, support and professional services.

What, if any, are your plans for open source? Are you currently looking for an open source ESB?

Posted by bethgb at 03:08 PM in Vendor Briefings | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us