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."