On another front, Red Hat is enlarging its push into enterprise middleware with the addition of an Enterprise Service Bus to its recently acquired JBoss application server middleware. The JBoss Enterprise Service Bus was introduced Nov. 20 at JBoss World in Berlin.
An ESB is considered a key building block of services-oriented architecture because it gets away from point-to-point messaging systems and implements general purpose routing between an application and many other pieces of software, such as other applications, middleware, databases or messaging systems.
The JBoss ESB 4.0 will become available in December and already has three years of production experience. Aviva Canada, Canada's second largest insurer, created the Rosetta ESB as it encountered integration problems rolling out Oracle Financials. Oracle's Fusion Middleware wasn't available at the time. Having generated an ESB, Aviva, a large JBoss Application Server user, donated it to JBoss, jump starting its service bus offering.
"The JBoss ESB is the result of a true community effort, from the technology donation to the individual developers who brought their expertise to the project," said Pierre Fricke, JBoss director of product management.
The JBoss ESB can leverage JBoss Rules, a rules engine that can set policies for routing content. It supports the IBM WebSphereMQ, Apache's ActiveMQ and JBossMQ messaging systems.
