Mulesource, WSO2, other OSS providers play the SOA platform card - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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January 15, 2008
Mulesource, WSO2, other OSS providers play the SOA platform card

It’s services oriented architecture (SOA) “framework” time in the open source software (OSS) community. For more on how the two buzzwords—SOA and OSS—interrelate, and even what they really mean, see my related feature article from November 2007. The new ingredient this year is the buzzword, framework. OSS-heritage players in the software market such as Mulesource, Red Hat (RHT) and WSO2 are trying to catch up with the proprietary-heritage OSS hybrids such as IBM (IBM), Oracle (ORCL), TIBCO (TIBX) and BEA (BEAS) in the SOA “platform” game. Proprietary-heritage OSS hybrid Iona made a similar announcement on December 12, 2007.

(Just for the record, our research shows users don’t care a wit about whether a company is an OSS pure play, an OSS-heritage OSS hybrid, or a proprietary-heritage OSS hybrid. But since the community blogosphere seems to like to keep track of such OSS virginity issues, we’ll play along.)

On January 14, WSO2 announced the debut of the WSO2 Web Services Framework for Ruby (WSF/Ruby), an OSS framework for providing and consuming Web services in the Ruby object-oriented programming language. On January 15, MuleSource announced a new subscription-only “enterprise-edition” packaging of the Mule Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) along with open-source governance and monitoring tools into an integration platform. (The announcement of an enterprise edition formally pushes Mulesource into the hybrid category decreasing the number of OSS pure plays further.) Given Iona’s December announcement of FUSE HQ, a solution based on OSS Hyperic that provides systems management and monitoring capabilities across all products in the FUSE family, we expect Red Hat to come in batting clean up any day now. Red Hat had previously promised a late fall rollout of its JBoss-centric SOA Platform when it announced JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2 in July 2007. It appears the leading OSS provider has instead waited in order to make the best feature/function response possible to the smaller organizations.

Everyone now perceives having a platform to be preferable to just offering some of the parts, such as an enterprise service bus (ESB), a registry/repository, or toolkit. Of course, as I said in my review of OSS in SOA, and as I said about the advent of the enterprise service bus in 2002, and as I said when proprietary vendors announced similar concepts 10 years ago using terms like Internet Application Components, S-O-A won’t matter much until we get some S’s.