IONA Celtix Middleware Takes Open Source Approach to SOA

Published: December 14, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Irish-American middleware developer IONA Technologies last week introduced Celtix Enterprise, a collection of new middleware products, based on open source software, designed to help organizations modernize their business applications by adapting them for service oriented architectures (SOAs).

IONA describes Celtix Enterprise as an enterprise service bus (ESB), a key component of enabling SOA. Within Celtix Enterprise lie two components, including messaging infrastructure called Celtix Advanced Messaging, and the Celtix Advanced Service Engine (ASE), a programming framework for Web service development. All of the software is based on open source development projects, and can help users implement a blend of open source and proprietary technologies, the company says.

According to IONA, Celtix Advanced Messaging was designed to be a technology-agnostic, standards-based, open and interoperable messaging infrastructure for use in distributed SOA environments. Celtix Advanced Messaging uses code developed as part of the Apache Incubator Qpid project, which implements the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), and is available now as an open source, subscription-based offering.

The other component, Celtix Advanced Service Engine, implements code developed in another Apache Incubator project called CXF. The goal of the CXF project is to create an enterprise quality framework that allows developers to use a variety of programming models, including JAX-WS, POJO, WS-RM, and Javascript, to develop interoperable Web services. The resulting services will have a pluggable binding and transport mechanism which enables a service to use more than SOAP and HTTP, according to the Apache Web site.

Larry Alston, IONA's vice president of marketing and product management, says Celtix Enterprise provides users with a technology-neutral, modern architectures that can be deployed incrementally to help users achieve their SOA goals. "Our customers are aggressively driving the convergence of open source and SOA and they are seeking vendors such as IONA that are capable of providing the resources they require to make open source technologies a strategic part of their SOA deployment plans," he says.

Celtix Enterprise is available now. For more information, go to www.iona.com/solutions/opensource.