'Swordfish' Eclipse SOA initiative makes its debut

By Alex Handy

March 25, 2009 —

Plans for an end-to-end open-source SOA stack built atop the newly released OSGi-based Swordfish ESB were revealed yesterday at EclipseCon, the Eclipse Foundation’s annual confab.

Swordfish will swim its way up the Eclipse project stream to link up with a forthcoming registry and repository project that will first arrive in the Galileo release train, coming this summer.

Dr. Ricco Deutscher, CTO of SOA service provider Sopera and a member of the board of directors for the Eclipse Foundation, said, “Swordfish is embedded in a larger initiative called Eclipse SOA. We want to develop a full-fledged enterprise service bus in it. We want to integrate system management and a registry repository. As of today, there is no enterprise registry service repository in open source. Therefore we plan to initiate a new project in eclipse to set the de facto standard."

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said that Eclipse is quite busy of late. “New projects are coming into Eclipse at a pretty fast pace. At the moment, we have 14 proposals,” he said, referring to the foundation's highest ever backlog of proposed projects.

“I think where we see a lot of the future potential for Eclipse is in these industry working groups, using Eclipse as a process for sharing innovation and building industry platforms. Any time you talk about companies collaborating in any way, you need four things. You have to have a licensing and [intellectual property] regime, and a governance model to make sure it's a level playing field. There needs to be a development process. And there has to be some form of technical architecture. You can get all four of those out of the box by coming and building collaboration at Eclipse. It saves an enormous amount of time and money."

Two months ago, the Eclipse Financial Platform proposal was accepted at Eclipse. This project seeks to build a standardized set of credit and finance management tools built on top of Eclipse. Milinkovich highlighted this project as an example of the interesting vertical market work that is coming into Eclipse.

Another interesting addition to the Eclipse platform was the move in February to bring the Jetty embeddable HTTP server under the Eclipse Foundation's wing. This Java-based Web server is now a runtime within the Eclipse platform, and version 7 will be released with the Galileo release train.

Mobile future
Ten years after OSGi first surfaced, the Alliance's initial goals are only now being realized. Milinkovich said that OSGi has “seen an enormous amount of uptake [in OSGi] as the modularity model for the [application] servers that are out there. The interesting thing, though, is it was originally designed to be used in embedded devices. Now, there are a lot of attempts to get it going in mobile.”

Indeed, Jon Bostrom, president of MobiNoir Consulting, spoke at EclipseCon of telecommunications company Sprint's current efforts to put OSGi onto many of its phones. Bostrom said that this effort has only recently come to market in the form of Sprint's lineup of newer Motorola phones based on Linux. Using OSGi, enterprise developers can quickly modify their mobile applications without the need to wipe phones completely in between software updates.

Red Hat released a new version of its developer tools at EclipseCon. The company addressed the growing portfolio of JBoss software with JBoss Developer Studio 2.0 Portfolio Edition.

Portfolio Edition is available without any technical support for US$99 per user. Much of the included support for JBoss software and platforms is designed to help both development and deployment of enterprise applications built on technologies such as the JBoss application server and Seam.

Related Search Term(s): Eclipse, OSGi, SOA

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