Last week I lectured on JBI and Open ESB to IT people. At the end of the presentation a delegate asked the awkard question: “Do you think that integration is one of the real concerns for the companies and not just a new buzz word or fashion”. We were at the end of the lecture and I had no time for a long and detailled answer. Be persuasive was a real challenge. In order to convince my interlocutor, I did not try to give him further detail on the “I” of JBI but simply I told him story that happened few days ago at Pymma consulting.

Here in UK, if you don't come from the big consulting agencies like Cap Gemini, Accenture or IGS, the companies are used to test the contractors during the interview . The tests are interesting theoretical exercises that often reveal the current IT preoccupations of the company.

By chance, four of our friends’ architects went for interviews and brought back the tests for debriefing. (Pymma is not IGS nor Accenture “thanks God”). The first had an interview with a software editor, the second with one of the largest retailer in Europe; the third with a major utility company in Benelux and then the fourth with an automotive manufacturer.

We compared the different tests, we were amazing to discover that the test topics were very similar.

The test requirements were as follow: “We want to create a new reliable, secure and scalable application bla bla bla ... For all the cases, the key requirements were: This application must be easily integrated in the company IS, able to communicate with legacy application and external partners. Integration was the key point requirement of the tests !!!

I don’t know if the four companies are a representative sample of the market, but it is clear for us that integration and agility are fast growing concerns for IT Teams.

I don’t know if I wan approval with my story, but regarding the tests similarities we are convinced that design and implementation of architecture dedicated for integration is the present challenge for many companies.

To be continued …

The last week at Sun Microsystems office in London, I had the opportunity to discuss with people working on Open ESB. It's always a pleasure to visit Sun’s people. They're always affable, thoughtful and the coffee not so bad.

During the first part of our meeting we exchange our points of view about JBI, Open ESB and the community and how our customers and prospect comprehend the product. It’s was not simple courtesies exchange but we discuss honestly about Open ESB difficulties.

During the second part of the meeting, we discussed about the new features and Sun’s marketing decisions about Open ESB. I am happy that some of our claims have been agreed by Sun. Let’s start by the most important:

From November a professional support for Open ESB will be proposed by Sun. This is very good news that will give reliability and confident to our customer.

Further detail on Sun support

Three support levels will be proposed with the 4 Open ESB based products defined by Sun Marketing. I report in this blog the products names and features detailed during our meeting but of course, they can be changed by Sun’s marketing at any time. But I think that finally this slicing will remain the same.

I describe bellow the four version proposed by SUN

1. Open ESB: Open ESB is the community which contains all the open source components and is part of the wider GlassFish community. The current Open ESB download includes most of the components and GlassFish, NetBeans bundle. Anyone can access the source for the core runtime from Open ESB. Open ESB is not just about GlassFish - the JBI core can run in WebSphere, JBoss or in Java SE (i.e. bare JVM). Sun will not provide support at this level. Support is provided by the community.

2. GlassFish ESB: GlassFish ESB is a binary distribution only of a supported set of components running in GlassFish and design time NetBeans tooling with the required add-ons pre-installed (e.g. binding wizard, custom encoders, XSLT / BPEL editor etc...). It includes a selection of stable service engines (Java EE, BPEL, XSLT, Data Mashup) and binding components (HTTP, FTP, FILE, JMS, Database, LDAP) designed and developed by Sun. GlassFish ESB will be downloadable Buying a license, you will get standard support, patch and knowledge database. This product aims at small and departmental applications since Clustering is not provided nor supported at this level. It can be found on https://open-esb.dev.java.net/glassfishesb

3. ESB suite: ESB suite is the competitor of IBM, Oracle-BEA ESB product. Designed for Enterprise applications. It supports Clustering, be packaged with Enterprise adaptor (mainframe, software package…). Premium services will proposed with this version (Top support, knowledge database, patch …). ESB Suite will be a strong competitor to legacy ESB Suite. It can be found on http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem/javacaps/esb_suite.jsp

4. Java CAPS: Java CAPS is the well known product that includes the ESB suite but also many other suites (Financial...). Java CAPS also includes MDM Suite which has an open source presence at Project Mural (https://mural.dev.java.net/) Further details on Java CAPS could be found on
http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem/javacaps/index.jsp

Once again, I would like to thank again Sun Team (Louis http://blogs.sun.com/polyblog , Mike http://blogs.sun.com/mikesblog/) for their real motivation for Open-ESB products, their dedication to the community and receptivity to our suggestions.

So what a benefit for ESB community?

The best consequence of this announcement is that we will able to propose professional support to our customers and prospects. As a result, Open-ESB will increase its creditability towards the executive and management. Now Open-ESB is in position to compete with other ESB Suites

At Pymma we think that it’s a time for new opportunities and good business with Open ESB.

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