WSO2, a Sri Lanka-based start up company, founded by members of the
Apache Web Services Project, today unveiled
an initiative that aims to take on existing players including IBM, Oracle and
BEA with the creation of an open source web service mediation framework.
Dubbed Synapse, the project will provide an open-source web services
transformation, management and routing system, also known as an enterprise
service bus (ESB), as an alternative to commercially licensed web services
integration software.
Synapse provides a framework to intermediate between two or more web
services, allowing users to introduce transformation and routing, promote loose
coupling between services, and support greater reliability and resiliency.
Additional details about Synapse are available on the Apache Software
Foundation Incubator
site here.
The proposal has been submitted to the Apache Software Foundation ‘incubator’
under the Web Services project.
WSO2 is joined by a list of more established players in the web services and
ESB spaces, including Blue Titan, IONA, Infravio and Sonic Software. These
companies will build a set of components that work together with Axis2 and other
Apache/open source projects to create a transformation, management and routing
system. To seed this project, Infravio said it will donate code from its
X-Broker product.
Ian Charlesworth, Ovum senior analyst, said: "The application integration
market is a tricky place to be at the moment. Organisations are clearly looking
to exploit web services and to simplify their whole integration architecture,
yet are reluctant to repeat the mistakes of the past by getting tied down by
proprietary software.
“Of course, there is likely to be a necessary proprietary element to any
commercial software solution, but when it comes to integration, the message from
the market is clear - stick to the standards; moreover, stick to a standard
implementation of standards!”
According to Charlesworth, the opportunity for the open source community is
to drive a wedge into the commercial web services integration offerings by
supplying a no-frills, but functional alternative to existing proprietary
offerings from firms including IBM, BEA, Oracle, webMethods and Tibco.
“When used in combination with the Apache Agila, Apache
Struts, Apache Axis, the
Spring Framework and Hibernate (referred to by
SourceLabs as SASH), the set of capabilities and functionality is both broad and
deep, and, to my mind, is a credible open-source option,” Charlesworth noted.
“A deepening issue for organisations looking to evaluate open-source
integration alternatives is that there are now so many, it can be difficult to
know where to start. A potential saving grace of these projects is the degree of
collaboration and knowledge exchange they foster within the development
community.
“Developers generally know a good, useful project when they see one. However,
mapping this to business and commercial relevance and overcoming support and
maintenance issues remain the largest barriers for most."
Paul Fremantle, vice president of technology at WSO2 said: "Synapse is
another significant step towards our objective of creating the best possible web
services platform in Apache."
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