Open source middleware consortium ObjectWeb on Tuesday announced the Petals project, a significant step forward for its year-old ESB initiative.
Petals will focus on the development of a Java Business Integration (JBI) platform for highly distributed integration environments. The announcement follows, and builds on, the June creation of the Celtix project, also under the ObjectWeb banner, which is developing an open source Java ESB.
The recently introduced JBI specification — also known as JSR 208 in the Java Community Process (JCP) — defines a container in which components from multiple vendors and various technologies can interact, making it easier to develop standards-based integration systems. The Petals JBI will be built on top of Celtix.
ObjectWeb, founded in 2002, is a Grenoble-based consortium allowing various specialised companies to work together on open source middleware. Celtix is backed by Iona Technologies of Ireland, while the principal backers of Petals are EBM WebSourcing of France and Brazil's Fossil E-Commerce.
The ESB initiative generally is a significant open-source offering for ESB middleware, which is designed to enable a SOA via an even-driven, XML-based messaging engine. Petals is aimed at supporting the JBI standard, currently neglected by many J2EE vendors with proprietary ESB offerings. Open source projects like Petals and Celtix are expected to accelerate the commoditisation of ESB, analysts Gartner have said.
Petals uses a highly distributed integration approach, running many JBI containers on different JVMs and achieving location transparency via a JMS-based transport layer. ObjectWeb plans for the platform to provide specialised B2B bindings. Integration with JOnAS, a J2EE 1.4-compliant enterprise application server from ObjectWeb, is also on the cards.
According to François Letellier, a member of the ObjectWeb executive committee, Petals will aim to provide ready-to-use systems, including transformation, logging, routing features and B2B features. "Petals is intended to be a distributed container, building on existing ObjectWeb components: Fractal, Dream, JORAM, XQuare, Lewys," he wrote in a blog posting earlier this month. Fractal and Dream are a component model and a component-based communication framework, both developed under ObjectWeb's aegis.
A first iteration of Petals is due by the end of this year, with a prototype available from ObjectWeb's Web site. The prototype embeds JORAM, a message-oriented middleware, for JMS support. Celtix is also aiming for an end of year release.
