Celtix
is an open source ESB project founded by Iona
, and hosted at ObjectWeb
. Like ServiceMix, Celtix is designed to serve as the foundation for a Service Oriented Architecture. Although the two project teams are both developing ESB solutions, there is a close level of collaboration between the two efforts, due to the complementary nature of the projects.
The ServiceMix development effort has focused on providing an ESB based on a JBI container and component suite. Celtix is focused on integration components and SOAP stacks. This means that there is actually not as much overlap between the two projects as one might expect. On the contrary, the two project teams are collaborating closely to avoid duplicating efforts and to enable reuse of each project's unique capabilities. For example, ServiceMix will reuse the SOAP stacks and integration components from Celtix, and Celtix will reuse the ServiceMix JBI container.
Why is ServiceMix focused on JBI? The ServiceMix team began work on its ESB solution at the time that the JBI specification was in discussion, so the team was able to plan on using JBI not only for integration capabilities at the endpoints, but also for internal APIs, to enable JBI-compliant solutions to deliver core functionality to the integration environment.
For example, because JBI supports a standard deployment unit format, ServiceMix supports hot deployment of any JBI-compliant BPEL engine (or set of BPEL files into a BPEL engine), rule engine, transformation engine, scripting engine or other integration component (such as specific JBI binding components) directly into ServiceMix. Also, ServiceMix contains a number of WS-* implementations built on JBI, such as WS Notification.
Today's Open Source ESB solutions are increasingly focused on interoperability. Despite the different approaches to integration that the ServiceMix and Celtix teams have taken, the advantage they enjoy as open source projects through close collaboration is the ability to leverage each other's strengths.