After several months of discussions around the right architecture for a SOA infrastructure for the 21st Century and much community involvement, an alpha version of JBossESB was released in March which outlined many of the architectural principles. We've had great feedback from community developers, partners and prospective customers, all of them endorsing the approach we're taking: that JBossESB is a SOA infrastructure supporting best-of-breed deployments based on JEMS and partner technologies. However, the one thing that we were having difficulty on was keeping up with interest and demand: everyone wants JBossESB yesterday. In the week following the closure of the Redhat deal, the JBoss division has made a strategic move to address that deficiency with the acquisition of the Rosetta ESB.
Rosetta is an ESB that's been in production deployments for over 3 years, handle tens of thousands of real-time and batch processing events from legacy and J2EE applications, insurance underwriting and real-time quote requests. Although Rosetta doesn't match the architecture the ESB team have been working on, it is close enough that with concerted effort we'll soon be in a position to provide a production-ready version of JBossESB that will become the premier development and deployment platform for SOA in the industry. What we have done up to this point is lay the foundations for that platform. With this acquisition, we are building on those strong foundations and pushing the community effort into a new and important phase.
It's worth spending a few moments just to consider exactly what it is that Rosetta brings to JBossESB: support for a variety of messaging services, including JBossMQ and MQSeries; a transformation engine to bridge data formats; a service registry; a persisted event repository to support governance of the ESB environment; a base transport mechanism; pluggable architecture; and a notification service to allow the ESB to register events and signal subscribers. All of this in a product that has been running continuously for 3 years: a pedigree and level of trust that is difficult to find elsewhere in this new and emerging market.
Another part of this Rosetta acquisition is that I'm happy to announce that Esteban Schifman, Chief Architect at Heuristica and part of the team that developed Rosetta, will be joining the JBossESB team. As well as his Rosetta knowledge, Esteban brings a great deal of experience in this space which will be critical for Redhat's success with JBossESB. I'd like to welcome Esteban to a great community of like-minded developers and users: I'm sure he'll find it as stimulating as the rest of us.
Finally, just to recap and briefly indicate where we are going next. JBoss has been making good progress in the SOA space with JEMS and early work on JBossESB; we've seen significant take-up of our technologies and ideas by customers and partners alike. Now that we've acquired Rosetta, we'll be able to accelerate our plans for delivering on the architectural goals we have developed and hopefully benefit the community at large with the preeminent SOA platform we all agree is needed. Redhat is uniquely poised at this stage to deliver on that requirement with JBossESB. We'll have a beta version available in the next few months and a GA ready by the end of the year.
If you're at JBoss World Vegas then come and hear my talk on the subject.
One last thing: if you're interested in participating, please get in touch! This is a thriving community, but there's always room for more involvement.