IONA has announced the availability of Celtix Enterprise 1.0, its open source ESB built upon a collection of open source projects, including the Tomcat service container, ActiveMQ, Celtix Advanced Messaging (built on Qpid, an open source implementation of AMQP) and — at the core — the Celtix Advanced Service Engine (ASE), which is based on Apache CXF. Both Celtix Advanced Messaging and Advanced Service Engine can also be downloaded separately.
InfoQ talked to IONA's CTO, Eric Newcomer, about the release.
According to Eric, the move away from licensing revenues towards a service & support model is an inevitable trend not only for IONA, but for the entire industry. He also acknowledges that this process will take its time:
For the foreseeable future we will continue to pursue a dual strategy, in which we will continue with our license revenue business and start a new line of business around open source service and support. At the moment it looks like most customers have a mixture of open source and commercially licensed software so we expect to continue with a mixture of the two as well. Of course we also expect both will continue to grow as the need for incremental and distributed SOA infrastructure grows, and that we will be able to continue to add value across both.
Questioned how Celtix compares to Apache Axis2, he noted that while there are a lot of similarities, Axis2 has taken a different view of Web services:
While Celtix Enterprise is more focused on the requirement Java developers have for JAX-WS APIs and JAXB data bindings, Axis2 centers around its own data model, Axiom, and anything you do with Axis2 has to deal with that. This is probably very good in theory but it is our experience that developers want to use the JCP standards, which are more widely adopted. Celtix Enterprise also includes support for AMQP and for the Eclipse SOA Tools, which aren't in Axis2 either.
Eric also pointed out that Celtix ASE provides for both SOAP-based and REST-based services (the latter "in a true REST style by supporting POST, PUT, GET, and DELETE as well as mapping arbitrary URIs".) Also supported are JavaScript and ECMAScript for XML (E4X) for both client and server development.