JavaOne features Sun open source ESB

Open source and free software strategies will be at the forefront during the JavaOne conference this week in San Francisco, with varied rollouts from BEA Systems, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and others. Although the Java language specification itself remains out of the open source domain, vendors are providing Java technologies through open source.

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Sun will unveil its open source enterprise service bus project, Java Enterprise Service Bus, with the 1.0 version of the ESB due this summer, said Joe Keller, Sun vice president of marketing for application and developer platforms. The ESB will be based on the Java Business Integration 1.0 specification.

“This [project] marks the beginning of the standardization of the integration technologies and the consolidation of integration with application servers, with Web servers [and] with portal servers to provide a standardized way of building out an application platform,” Keller said.

Sun also will offer its Java System Application Server, Platform Edition, using open source. “This is an application server that drives businesses around the world,” Keller said. The product constitutes Sun’s implementation of Java Enterprise Edition 5.

Both the application server and ESB technologies, including source code, will be released under Sun’s Common Development and Distribution License today at www.java.net.

BEA will offer free plug-ins for popular open source Java frameworks, which will function with an upcoming Eclipse-based release of BEA’s WebLogic Workshop developer tool. These plug-ins will support the Beehive, Spring, and Struts frameworks.

“The main thing that’s common across all these frameworks is they provide a simplified programming model, often reducing the amount of code you have to write and the complexity of the code. The second thing they do is promote best practices,” said Jim Rivera, BEA technology director. BEA also will extend WebLogic Workshop to support the open source Tomcat and Geronimo containers.

Borland will release its Together 2006 modeling suite, boasting Model-Driven Architecture support, business process modeling, and model and code quality assurance. “This has all been basically unified onto the Eclipse platform,” said Marc Brown, a Borland product marketing director.

Oracle will make its JDeveloper tool available for free as a way to boost the company’s Fusion middleware.

Sybase will announce Sybase WorkSpace, an Eclipse-based development environment for SOAs. WorkSpace also enables mobile application development.

The Eclipse Foundation will announce releases of several open source projects, including Eclipse Platform 3.1. Other project releases include the Test and Performance Tools, Web Tools, and Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools platforms; and the Modeling and Graphical Editing frameworks.