IONA Technologies is supporting a new open source ESB (enterprise service bus) which will help companies integrate departmental applications for SOAs (service-oriented architectures) and Web services deployments, according to Iona Technologies.

The open-source ESB will provide the foundation for building out SOAs (service-oriented architectures), said Eric Newcomer, Iona's chief technology officer. Newcomer said Iona will continue to market and upgrade its proprietary ESB solution, Artix, but the company is pursuing an open-source version to buoy the market for ESB functionality. Moreover, Iona hopes that delivering an open-source ESB will help drive adoption of ESBs and SOAs. "We want to try to accelerate market changes," Newcomer said. "We're looking at the open-source market as where the commodity-level components are going."

The offering is initially meant for deployments ranging between 20 to 30 services and supporting hundreds of users. "The original concept wasn't [for Celtix to be used in] mission-critical, high-performance applications, but rather for those projects that are departmental in nature," said Larry Alston, vice president of product management at Iona. "Celtix's big strength is that it is a highly distributed architecture and not totally reliant on a central hub [or] stack," said analyst Shawn Willett of Current Analysis. Celtix is available from Iona through Eclipse, GPL (GNU General Public License), or LGPL (Lesser GPL) licenses.

Celtix 1.0 will be unveiled Monday. The Java-based ESB is hosted by the ObjectWeb Consortium and is one of a growing number of open source ESBs, in a field that includes SymphonySoft's Mule and LogicBlaze's ServiceMix. Celtix will run with any Java Business Integration container and features an implementation of the JAX-WS (Java API for XML Web Services) specification for building Web services-based Java applications. Multiple transports are supported in Celtix, including Java Message Service, XML, and HTTP. A SOAP stack is featured, as well.

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Prashanth Rai