JBoss, a division of Red Hat introduced JBoss ESB, which rounds out the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS) as the defining open source platform for service-oriented architecture (SOA). With the addition of JBoss ESB to Red Hat’s arsenal, enterprises now have a complete set of leading, low-cost SOA building blocks for modern applications and the ability to run them on a virtualized Linux platform.

An ESB intermediates interactions between enterprise applications, business services, business components, and middleware to integrate and automate business processes. Built on mature JEMS technology and the Rosetta ESB—a field-proven ESB donated by a longstanding customer in the insurance sector—JBoss ESB comes with a three-year track record in handling complex integration and real-time events in a mission-critical business environment with 3,000 employees across 40 locations serving two million customers.

“JBoss ESB is the result of a true community effort, from the technology donation that helped accelerate our development timeline to the individual developers who brought their expertise to the project,” said Pierre Fricke, director of product management, JBoss. “This release provides a fundamental building block for our SOA integration platform. As an integrated company, Red Hat and JBoss are focused on delivering the leading open source platform for next-generation computing that drives down infrastructure costs for our customers without compromising on value and choice.”

JBoss ESB leverages other JEMS technologies, such as the JBoss Rules business rules engine for content-based routing and JBossMQ for messaging. Over time, JBoss plans to extend JBoss ESB with additional JEMS products such as the JBoss jBPM business process management and workflow engine, to create a complete business process automation platform. As part of its effort to enable customers and accelerate their path to SOA, JBoss will be looking to partners to extend the ESB with connectors, B2B gateways, SOA governance, and business services. Enterprises can start building on JBoss ESB today, with the assurance of standards-based portability.

“With their strong track record in Linux and open-source middleware, Red Hat and JBoss are well positioned to accelerate SOA implementations across the entire market. Vyante sees this as a great opportunity and is working to ensure a strong partnership by optimizing our EnvoySOA product for JEMS and JBoss ESB,” said Aaron Kopel, CEO, Vyante.

Key features of JBoss ESB 4.0 include:

* A pluggable architecture enables all JBoss ESB subsystems such as messaging and transformation to be swapped with other alternatives, which gives customers flexibility and choice.
* Support for a variety of messaging services, including secure FTP, HTTP, email and JMS (JBossMQ, JBoss Messaging, IBM MQSeries, and ActiveMQ).
* Transformation engine that bridges data formats for seamless communication, supporting XSLT and Smooks, a flexible alternative.
* Service registry for service discovery and integration, using JAX-R and UDDI.
* Persisted event repository to support governance of the ESB environment.
* Notification service to allow the ESB to register events and signal subscribers.
* Content-based routing based on XPath and JBoss Rules for a more flexible and dynamic alternative to publish-subscribe.
* Gateways that allow non-ESB aware clients to interact with services deployed within the JBoss ESB environment.