ServiceMix Open Source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Now Available; Open Source ESB Provides Agile, JBI-based Integration Solution for SOA.

LONDON -- The ServiceMix project team has announced the availability of the first major release of its Open Source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Following the introduction of ServiceMix at the JavaOne Developer Conference in July and two subsequent milestone releases, project architects James Strachan and Robert Davies have approved the version 1.0 release. ServiceMix 1.0 is licensed under the Apache 2.0 open source license, and is available for download in binary and source distributions at http://servicemix.codehaus.org.

ServiceMix is the first available Open Source ESB based on the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification. The currently available release provides a complete JBI container and a suite of JBI components for bindings and transports. "What we're saying with this release is, you could go online and read what a lot of people are saying about JBI, or you can download ServiceMix and get hands-on with JBI right now," said Strachan. With its advanced support for JBI available under the Apache 2.0 open source license, ServiceMix already enables JBI support for other open source projects, including the Apache Geronimo application server platform. The ServiceMix team is also working on the Apache Synapse ESB to add JBI support.

ServiceMix is also unique in its flexibility. "We designed ServiceMix to be deployed in almost any way," explained Davies. "There's a debate about whether it's better to provide integration functionality at the edges of the network, or in a server that's separate from the edges. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses - so we've built an ESB solution that works in either scenario. It's simple and lightweight enough to deploy into any Java Virtual Machine or web server, as well as being designed to take full advantage of the facilities of a robust Java Enterprise Edition application server."

Just as ServiceMix is designed for flexible deployment, it's also designed to ensure reliability through either message-oriented middleware technologies such as JMS (Java Messaging Service) or Web Services standards. This flexibility is one of the key requirements of an 'Agile ESB', a design objective detailed by the ServiceMix architects in the August issue of Java Developer's Journal.

As an Open Source solution, ServiceMix is designed to enable business integration at a much lower cost of acquisition and ownership. The Open Source licensing model is also especially important to business integration, because the ServiceMix project can collaborate with other open source integration projects. "We bring some things to the table, and other projects can bring some things to the table as well," explained Davies. "If you're dealing with a truly standards-driven Open Source integration solution, you should have 'plug-and-play' compatibility with the stuff developed in other projects."

Key Technical Features of ServiceMix 1.0

JBI Container:

-- Normalized Message Service and Router

-- JBI Management MBeans

-- Ant Tasks for management and installation of components

-- Support for the JBI deployment units with hot-deployment of JBI components

JBI Components

Service components:

-- Rules-based routing via the Drools rule engine.

-- BPEL support for WS-BPEL via PXE

-- Cache, for caching service invocations using a Map cache or a JCache provider

-- Groovy, for clean integration with the Groovy scripting language as a component, transformer or expression language

-- JCA, which allows the Java Connector Architecture to be used for efficient thread pooling, transaction handling and consumption on JMS or other resource adapters

-- Quartz, to support enterprise timer integration via the Quartz library

-- RSS component for integrating and processing RSS news feeds in JBI

-- Scripting support for any JSR 223 compliant scripting engine to be used to easily create a component, perform a transformation or be an expression language

-- Transformations using XSLT 

-- Validation, for schema validation of documents using JAXP 1.3 and XMLSchema or RelaxNG

-- XPath and XSLT based routing and transformation engine

-- XSQL for working with SQL and XML via Oracle's XSQL library

SOAP bindings:

-- ActiveSOAP, the lightweight StAX-based SOAP stack

-- SAAJ for Soap With Attachments and Apache Axis support

-- XFire for clean integration with POJOs via the XFire SOAP stack

-- WSIF for integration with the Apache Web Service Invocation Framework

Transport Bindings:

-- Email support via JavaMail

- File-based components for writing messages to files and polling directories and sending files into the JBI

-- FTP support via the Jakarta Commons Net library

-- HTTP, for both client-side GET/POST with the Jakarta Commons HttpClient, and server side processing with servlets or Jetty

-- Jabber to provide bindings to Jabber network via the XMPP protocol

-- JMS via the Java Messaging Service plus highly reliable and scalable transports in ActiveMQ, including persistence, recovery and transaction support

-- VFS via the Jakarta Commons Net library, which provides access to file systems, jars/zips/bzip2, temporary files, WebDAV, Samba (CIFS), HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and SFTP, among others

More detailed information about ServiceMix features, as well as the ServiceMix binary and source distributions, are available immediately for download, under the Apache 2.0 license, at http://servicemix.codehaus.org.

About ServiceMix

ServiceMix(TM) is the Open Source ESB solution built from the ground up to provide an agile foundation for a Service-Oriented Architecture.

ServiceMix is based on the Java Business Integration standard, and is designed to support Web Services standards for business integration.

ServiceMix binary and source distributions are now available under the Apache 2.0 license at http://servicemix.codehaus.org. The ServiceMix project welcomes new members.