Apache Synapse Announces Milestone 2 Release

The Apache Synapse team recently announced the release of Milestone 2. Apache Synapse (http://incubator.apache.org/synapse/) is a lightweight Web Services and XML broker.

Synapse is built on top of Apache Axis2. Axis2 is designed to enable web service "endpoints". This allows applications which previously were not designed with web services in mind to communicate using web services. The Synapse Project is built as an "intermediary", or broker service which sits between service consumers and service providers. Thus the use cases for Synapse are different from that of Axis, but the software uses the same underlying object model, called AXIOM.

Synapse has the ability to route, transform and log messages passing through it. Synapse uses a simple XML based configuration language to allow users to control the brokering of XML messages including both SOAP and XML/HTTP. With full support for WS-Addressing, XSLT, XPath and regex based routing, Synapse has a functional starter set of mediators. Synapse has an architecture which allows for pluggable mediators to handle a vast number of possible application scenarios.

New features this release:

• A streamlined configuration model and a new XML syntax
• Concept of Endpoints
• Global and message context based 'properties', and a new XPath extension function synapse:get-property() to read them
• New switch mediator
• XML Schema Validation using Apache Xerces
• Enhanced and streamlined mediators - send, drop, log, makefault, transform, header, filter, class, set-property, sequence, in & out
• Improved Spring support
• Synapse initialization on startup rather than first message
• Sample applications and configurations demonstrating most of the above features

The Synapse Project continues to be in the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Incubator. Projects in the incubator have not yet been released as fully sanctioned projects from the ASF and must pass specific criteria in order to do so.

Synapse Milestone 2 can be downloaded from this location: (http://incubator.apache.org/synapse/download.cgi) Documentation is available here (http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/Synapse/SynapseUserGuide)