Eclipse Announces Initial Release of Swordfish Enterprise Service Bus

The Eclipse Foundation is expected to announce on March 23 the first release of Swordfish, a next-generation enterprise service bus that provides the flexibility and extensibility required by enterprises to successfully deploy a service-oriented architecture strategy. 

Swordfish is based on the OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) standard and builds upon successful open-source projects, including Eclipse Equinox and Apache ServiceMix. OSGi will play a major role at this year's EclipseCon, according to officials from the Eclipse Foundation and other vendors announcing new technology at the conference.

“Last year we announced a strategy to provide open-source run-time technology based on Equinox and OSGi,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive  director of the Eclipse Foundation, in a statement. “The first release of Swordfish is a great example of the progress that is being made to develop our run-time technology portfolio. Over the next year I expect we will see more interesting run-time technology built at Eclipse.”

Swordfish is based on real-world SOA deployment experience and knowledge, Eclipse officials said.  It provides the features and extensible framework required by enterprises and system integrators to customize their ESB to meet the specific needs of an enterprise. These features include:

•    Support for distributed deployment, which results in more scalable and reliable application deployments by removing a central coordinating server.

•    A run-time Service Registry that allows services to be loosely coupled, making it easier to change and update different parts of a deployed application. The Registry uses policies to match service consumers and service providers based on their capabilities and requirements.

•    An extensible Monitoring Framework, which manages events that allow for detailed tracking of how messages are processed. These events can be stored for trend analysis and reporting, or integrated into a CEP (complex event processing) system.   

•    A Remote Configuration Agent, which makes it possible to configure a large number of distributed servers from a central configuration repository without the need to touch individual installed instances.

“We are developing Swordfish to meet the requirements we experienced deploying large-scale SOA applications at Deutsche Post and other large enterprises,” explained Ricco Deutscher, chief technology officer of Sopera and a member of the Eclipse Runtime Project Management Committee. “Using Equinox and OSGi, we are able to provide the flexible and extensible architecture required for SOA deployments to be successful.”

The first release of Swordfish 0.8 will be available for download the first week of April from www.eclipse.org/swordfish/.