Will Swordfish make its point?
The ECLIPSE organization has finally made its announcement of the first release ofSwordfish, the open source ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) framework.
A lot of the work for Swordfish has come from Sopera, a German open source company that has developed an offering around the DeutschePost service bus development. Sopera offers a valid and competent framework for service integration, and therefore it is assumed that Swordfish might also work.
So, will Swordfish make a successful strike at the ESB market? So far, open source ESB projects have not had a great deal of success, and as far as 2009 goes Lustratus has forecast that open source projects will suffer due to the lack of the necessary people resources to turn open source frameworks into a useful user implementation. However, Swordfish has the backing of the influential ECLIPSE organization, which has done a lot to standardize the look and feel of many software infrastructure tools.
Looking at the initial marketing thrust for Swordfish, things don’t look to good. From the announcement letter, the top functional bullet reads
Support for distributed deployment, which results in more scalable and reliable application deployments by removing a central coordinating server.
Well – duh! This is not new – it is part of the basic definition of what an ESB does! However, this initiative is still worth watching, despite the ill-fated marketing attempts so far. ECLIPSE has significant industry backing for its GUI look-and-feel stuff, and indeed most of the big industry names like IBM, Oracle and SAP are involved in the running of ECLIPSE, and provide a lot of the financial backing.
It is this that might be the source of most excitement with Swordfish. Oracle and IBM both actively market and sell their own ESBs, and SAP offers its own equivalent functionality as part of its NetWeaver set of offerings. I wonder how they feel about ECLIPSE driving an open-source ESB version that competes on functionality and is free? I would love to be a fly on the wall in internal ECLIPSE meetings about the future of Swordfish.
Steve
Posted in enterprise architecture, enterprise service bus, esb, IBM, Imported, Open Source, Oracle, SOA, Sopera, Vendor news
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