This month, I stayed in Paris for few days and by chance, I had the opportunity to met people from EBM Websourcing, Gael Blondelle (CTO) and Pascal Portes (Sales Manager).

EBM resourcing is a software company which develops an interesting implementation of JBI named Petals. The company is member of the JSR 312 (JBI V2.0) expert group.

During one hour, we discussed about JBI projects, compared Petals and Open-ESB features. We shared ideas and feedback on ESB projects and integration technologies.

Petals is a JBI open-Source implementation that contrary to Open-ESB, has been conceived from the beginning, as a stand-alone application fully distributed. This is one of the main strengths of the product. You can define multiple domains on different machines and different locations, and consider them as a global bus (NMR).

Petals and Open-ESB integration processes are similar but Petals development tools (based on Eclipse) do not emphasize on WSDL as Netbeans does.

Petals is packaged with many Services Engines (BPEL, XSLT, EIP…) and Binding Components (Http, Soap, FTP, Mail…). A nice and easy-to-use console is provided for administration and supervision.

Congratulation to EMBWebsourcing for this very interesting project and Good luck to Petals.

Jonathan Schwartz new policy

Few years ago, Jonathan Schwartz replaced Scott McNealy as SUN Microsystems CEO. Swartz's first decision was to convert Sun into an Open-Source company. Consequently, Solaris OS, Application Servers and even the Java language were opened and their sources published. At present, Sun is viewed as a major Open Source actor.

Sun’s new sales philosophy proposes, on one hand, its best products in an open-source format and on the other hand, commercial support and hardware. The best examples of this new philosophy are Open-Solaris and Glassfish. You can download these products, use them and test them. After you have built applications with these tools and wish to move into a production environment, you can buy support from Sun.

Open source or Commercial version, it's up to you!

Alternatively, you can as well buy commercial versions at the first place. Even if open sources and commercial versions are slightly different than the open-source ones, more than 95% of their code is originated from the same development branch. Example : SUN proposes its queue messaging system with two similar versions, respectively named “SUN QM” and "Open-MQ". The only difference is the amount you pay for the technical support.

Everyone can find advantages in this sales policy on Sun products: companies and developers try and develop for free and can rely on Sun support in production. As a matter of fact, Sun uses these “free” products as Trojan horses to conquer new market shares, penetrate new companies and sell Sun hardware.

Why not for ESB Products ?

Unfortunately, there is a small issue in this picture: Sun's ESB platform is the exception in this sales policy. In Fact, Sun proposes two different tools for ESB developments. The first product. "JCAPS", is a commercial product inherited from Seebeyond. The second product, "Open-ESB" is based on JBI specifications (JSR 208) and was developed from scratch about 2 years ago.

Alas, JCAPs and Open-ESB are definitely two different products.

• JCAPS ignores JBI specifications
• JCAPS connectors are based on JCA specifications and not on JBI.
• Open-ESB development process is based on Web services specifications, JCAPS not.
• JCAPS and Open-ESB developments are not compatible.

Hundreds other differences can be found between the two products.

We can understand that for a while, for technical, marketing or business reasons, a company supports more than one product lines with the same functionalities. IBM does it and Oracle buying BEA will do it also.

However, there are several things that Pymma would like to understand:

• Why the download of JCAPS is only available for authorized JCAPS Partner ?
• Why SUN does not provide support for open-ESB as it does for Glassfish, Open Solaris or Open MQ ?
• Why JBI or Open-ESB are never mentioned at most ESB seminars organized by Sun Centres in the UK ?
• Why Sun marketing, Gurus or consultants are prolix about JBI in the public lectures and technical forums, and at the same ignore Open-ESB when they advice companies ?
• Is the policy of Jonathan Swartz policy only applicable for Java Legacy applications (Application Server, Message queuing…)? not for ESB tools ?

Of course, we already asked these questions to SUN but we never got clear answers.

Thanks for clarifying Sun's position

Many companies believe in JBI and their developers spend time and energy working on Open-ESB . These companies would certainly be interested to hear Sun's explanations on the above questions. They probably want to be sure that Open-ESB will not be just a prototype for the new JCAP version (only reserved for SUN JCAPS Partners). They certainly want to be credible by proposing SUN's professional support on Open-ESB as they do for Glassfish and Open-Solaris. After, they only need from SUN to clarify its position and give a clear prospective for the future of JBI and Open-ESB. We hope that through this blog Sun will hear us and we will give us clear answers.

Le mois dernier, j'ai reçu un DVD de Sun Microsystem contenant une version d'OpenSolaris (www.openSolaris.org) et pour la première fois, j'ai pu installer Solaris sur mon vieux Thinkpad T40 qui grâce à des perfusions de GigaOctet de ram, rend encore de bons services. C'était la première fois que je voyais s'allumer la lumière témoin du wireless. Après une rapide séance de configuration, la machine était prête au service. Je précise que par devoir ou par paresse, j'ai toujours travaillé dans un environnement Windows et que je ne suis pas du tout compétent en compilation Unix ou en écriture de scripts shell plus ou moins mystérieux ou ésotériques pour moi. La configuration dont je parle ici, ne concernait que la connexion Internet et l'impression .J'en profitais dans la foulée pour télécharger les versions Solaris X86 des outils java actuellement utilisés chez Pymma (NetBeans, GlassFish, open-ESB).

Les vacances de fin d'année passées, je me suis penché plus sérieusement sur ma nouvelle configuration et depuis bientôt 10 jours, je travaille parallèlement sur un environnement Windows et un environnement Open Solaris. A première vue, l'avantage est à Windows. L'interface utilisateur est mieux finie, les fontes sont plus lisses, sans défauts et tous les logiciels du monde sont à notre disposition. Cependant, en utilisant la suite de développement Netbeans / Glassfish / Open-ESB que je me suis aperçu avec surprise de l'extraordinaire fluidité et de la vitesse des applications Java sous Solaris. Rien que pour l'ouverture du serveur d'application le temps gagné est important en pourcentage. La compilation et le déploiement d'applications sont rapides. Un sentiment de stabilité et sérénité se dégage de cette configuration et par conséquent, j'arrive à fournir un travail plus important et avec une meilleure qualité.

Je vous conseille vivement de tenter l'expérience soit en partitionnant votre disque, soit en utilisant un logiciel de virtualisation. (OpenSolaris ne s'installe pas sous virtual PC (Janvier 2008) mais cela fonctionne bien avec VMWare pour Windows).

Faites donc un essai et dites moi ce que vous en pensez

Paul