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In a move it says will help developers become more productive, a Bedford, Massachusetts-based company that provides infrastructure software for business applications this week released a new enterprise version of its flagship service bus.

 

Officials at Progress Software Corporation say their open source FUSE ESB 4.0 – an enterprise version of the Apache ServiceMix 4.0 – will support the Java Business Integration 2.0 standard and is backwards-compatible with JBI 1.0.

 

Progress says customers are attracted to the open source product’s low up-front costs as well as FUSE’s active online community and resources, available here.

 

IT insiders say that most open-source users are technology-aggressive adopters whose priorities are vendor independence, standards-compliance and flexibility. But as open source solutions expand into more conservative markets, more and more of the technologies are being used to meet IT challenges.

 

According to officials from Progress, the new FUSE ESB’s single platform is designed to make developers comfortable, allowing them to implement integration patters with familiar programming models.

 

Features of the product include a so-called “normalized message router,” which is a standard way for components to pug in and talk to an ESB, and an OSGi framework, which offers a faster way to create integration components as modules.

 

This week, TMCnet caught up with Jaime Meritt (pictured below), the company’s director of FUSE product management. We talked to him about the benefits of the ESB in the current economic climate, particularly as an open source solution.

 

Our exchange follows.

 

Jaime Meritt: We believe a downturn in the economy and tightening of budgets actually provides an opportunity for an increase in open source adoption. We often see cost and the budget approval process as driving factors in the decision to try out open source.

TMCnet: How is the open-source component of this release expected to facilitate its deployment among businesses?

JM: The new FUSE ESB release is an open source product. The fact that it is Apache-licensed makes it easier for users to adopt the product because the Apache license allows a great deal of flexibility in deployment. The availability of the source code and the focus on open standards in FUSE ESB combined make it very attractive, because it means that users have full access and can easily customize and connect to all the different technologies throughout their enterprise.

 

FUSE ESB is a productized version of Apache ServiceMix, which is a very popular open source ESB. FUSE ESB is based on the Apache ServiceMix code, and also provides a predictable release schedule, additional platform testing, extensive documentation and is backed with enterprise support, consulting and training. The Apache projects are open source projects. We take the open source projects and turn those into products ready for enterprise deployment.

TMCnet: Specifically, what steps did Progress Software (News - Alert) take in designing the FUSE ESB 4.0 to make the product appealing to developers? What value proposition is Progress Software bringing with this product, given the service bus market? 

JM: The FUSE team focused on usability, flexibility and use of open standards in developing FUSE ESB 4.0. By leveraging key open standards, like JBI and OSGi, FUSE ESB provides a pluggable, easy to use architecture for a common ESB platform cost effective for pilot through large scale deployments. The new FUSE Integration Designer leverages the popular Enterprise Integration Patterns made popular by the book of the same name by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf to provide point and click with pictures to creation integration patterns quickly and easily.

 

The FUSE Integration Designer also provides tooling for creating and deploying Web services within FUSE ESB using FUSE Services Framework – which is based on Apache CXF a very popular open source Web services framework. A lot of users like how we package, test, and support the Apache projects and also focus on interoperability and testing across the components. The FUSE open source product family offers an open source ESB, services framework, mediation, and a message broker – each based on a popular Apache project - all tested to work together with a focus on ease of use, flexibility and standards. We provide a single throat to choke for a full open source SOA platform - this makes it more amenable for adoption from a business perspective.

 
Many businesses have requirements that cannot be met by readily available open source solutions. The backing of Progress Software and the integration with the Progress SOA Portfolio allows us to address these needs by providing a combination of open source and commercial offerings to address all of the customer’s SOA infrastructure requirements through a single vendor.