Today IONA announces Celtix, an open source Java Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
There are a lot of open source projects out there, but many of them are essentially closed designs based on little more than some unproven ideas in a couple peoples' heads. We're building Celtix based on the Java Business Integration (JBI) standard. Because JBI incorporates lessons from real-world business integration systems, including our own, it will provide firm direction for the effort.
JBI avoids the errors of EAI by promoting service-based integration without requiring hubs and canonical protocols and formats. Another important feature of JBI is that it's a standard, whereas everything EAI was purely proprietary. JBI's use of WSDL enables a high degree of integration flexibility. In fact, some of JBI's design features bear a close resemblance to Artix, which, as our customers have already proven on numerous projects, enables high-performance integration with extreme flexibility and adaptability. Nobody knows how to build this kind of SOA infrastructure better than we do, and we'll prove that again with Celtix.
We're sponsoring the project under ObjectWeb, mainly because of their open source middleware focus and because they, like IONA, have a global presence.
I think this is gonna be fun!