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LogicBlaze has announced the availability of LogicBlaze Fuse, an open-source SOA platform.
Marina Del Rey, Calif.-based LogicBlaze said Fuse is the industrys first service-oriented architecture platform provided as an open-source distribution.
LogicBlaze Fuse aggregates, packages and pre-validates a set of proven technologies from the Apache Software Foundation and Apache Software Foundation Incubator, including an ESB (enterprise service bus), messaging platform, persistence database, service registry, management console and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) orchestration engine, said Winston Damarillo, executive chairman of the company.
LogicBlaze announced the availability of Fuse on March 27.
“Weve released Fuse, a tested, integrated, documented suite of open-source software primarily based on Apache technology,” Damarillo said.
Fuse consists of: an installer for Mac, Linux and Windows; a lightweight deployment kernel, for application server-independent component deployment; a management console, for monitoring SOA components, as well as providing real-time statistics on message flows; the Apache ServiceMix Enterprise Service Bus, as the runtime fabric for SOA processes, and the point of integration SOA components; Apache ActiveMQ messaging system, for reliable and high performance messaging, and connectivity to existing message-oriented middleware solutions; the Apache Derby database, for message persistence; the Apache jUDDI Directory Server, for service registry and lookup, enabling composite Web services; the Apache Ode Orchestration engine, for orchestration of composite services through BPEL-defined processes; and supporting documentation, the company said.
Meanwhile, Damarillo said LogicBlaze has entered into an agreement with IBM under which LogicBlaze will distribute the IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition , which is based on the open-source Apache Geronimo project, as an OEM component of LogicBlaze Fuse.
Fuse is an open-source solution distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Fuse lowers the barrier to SOA adoption by eliminating the complexity, restrictions and dependencies of proprietary SOA solutions, while delivering significant cost savings for licensing and implementation, Damarillo said.
“Fuse is a single package available as a free download, and well offer subscription support,” Damarillo said.
Indeed, Damarillo said he believes the SOA market can stand a high-volume, low-cost solution to support things like green-field integration for users seeking service orientation and service aggregation.
In addition, Damarillo said the market for users doing Web 2.0 development with mashups and the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python) stack.
“These are the general markets were targeting,” he said. “This is an economic entry point with a pure open-source play.”
At TheServerSide Java Symposium last week in Las Vegas, Bruce Snyder, a senior architect at LogicBlaze, said, “We are going to see a meeting of SOA and Web 2.0. Its going to become easier to unify SOA and Web 2.0.”
Damarillo agreed. “Our long term goal is to have people view the SOA runtime as a commodity,” he said.
“We dont want to have a huge price point. BEA [Systems] AquaLogic is priced at about $25,000 per CPU. We want to be able to offer a competing solution for only what it costs for maintenance on the BEA offering.”
Moreover, Damarillo said he believes Fuse will “bring SOA to the masses. We think the SOA architectural advantage should be universal. Its applicable to SMBs [small to midsize businesses] too, and it should be accessible to broad-based customers.”
Regarding the deal with IBM, Damarillo said, “Some people want an end-to-end solution, and they want an app server, so we can resell the IBM stack and IBM support.”
In addition, Damarillo said LogicBlaze will look “to partner with the rest of the infrastructure players. After IBM well partner with other infrastructure vendors.”
However, “over time the platform that provides the best components for SOA should come from open source,” Damarillo said.
“We are pleased that LogicBlaze selected WebSphere Application Server Community Edition as the application platform for their open source based SOA offerings,” said Scott Cosby, Gluecode transition executive, IBM WebSphere Software, in a statement.
“LogicBlazes customers will be able to harness the power and innovation of the Apache Geronimo application server as well as IBMs support by adopting IBMs WebSphere Application Server Community Edition.”
Meanwhile, Fuse is delivered with the LogicBlaze CoRE (Community-oriented Real-time Engineering) Network, a subscription-based framework for production and developer level support and maintenance, Damarillo said.
Through CoRE, LogicBlaze customers can leverage the engineering environment required to support the distributed, asynchronous and iterative requirements of SOA project development, integration and maintenance, he said.