Enterprise Service Bus Enters the Mix -- ADTmag

Enterprise Service Bus Enters the Mix

By ADT Staff
September 1, 2005

The ServiceMix project team has released ServiceMix 1.0, an open-source enterprise service bus and SOA toolkit built from the ground up on the semantics and APIs of the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification JSR 208 and released under the Apache license.

The release provides a complete JBI container and a suite of JBI components for bindings and transports. 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.

"We designed ServiceMix to be deployed in almost any way," says Robert Davies, one of the project’s architects. "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."

ServiceMix is 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.”

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, here.