Whats happening with FUSE ESB

Guillaume has a great post on FUSE ESB...

My company IONA provides support on Apache ServiceMix via a distribution called FUSE ESB available from the Open Source IONA site.

What's in FUSE ESB right now? Well, it's roughly a distribution of ServiceMix trunk. This implies that FUSE ESB is released ahead of the Apache ServiceMix distribution (the latest release is 3.1.1, whereas FUSE ESB is based on 3.2).

Why are you using the latest trunk instead of the most stable branch? Well, mostly because our customers needs some of the latest features available. We take great care of what is in our Fuse branch: we do not necessarily backport all new stuff from trunk. We may also add some specific customer needs inside our own distribution, features that are not present in the trunk version.

So is that a fork? Certainly not :-) We have always supported Apache ServiceMix and we will continue to do so. But our customers have specific needs, so we may need to do custom development or have custom branches for them to fullfill these needs. Over time, we put the features that we consider generic enough back to the community. But this level of support can not be provided in a community driven environment such as the Apache Software Foundation. Let alone the fact that our customers often require privacy regarding their issues or their specific needs, environments and projects, so that it becomes difficult to use the open mailing lists of the community.

So is that a closed source version? No. The Apache License would allow that (quite the opposite of the GPL), but this is not what we aim for. Our process is quite open: as an example, I've recently developed an AsyncBridge EIP pattern for FUSE ESB (see the issue) that will certainly be contributed back to the community...

Hopefully, this blog entry will clarify a bit the IONA policy with respect to the Apache projects it supports and the relationship between FUSE ESB and ServiceMix. Feel free to download it and give it a try...

Podcast on Apache Camel, Enterprise Integration Patterns and 1.1.0 release

I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions about Apache Camel recently. You can listen to the podcast or read the online transcript. Apologies in advance for any rambling :) - I did enjoy it though.

In related Camel news, the Camel 1.1.0 Release has been cut and voted; its just about to move to the maven repo & Apache mirror system any moment now. Cool beans! It contains numerous new features...

• hugely improved Bean Integration to work nicely with beans and Camel; making Camel even less intrusive
• improved Spring XML support using JAXB2 and code-generating a nice XML Schema
• new Enterprise Integration Patterns like Aggregator, Throttler, Delayer
• new Languages Supported such as EL and OGNL
• new Components like VM, Event, Log, Validation, Jing, MSV
• new Examples such as Spring Example, ETL Example and BAM
• improved distributed testing with via the Mock component
• new Camel Maven Plugin for easier running of Camel routes and Examples in Maven

Incidentally I really love the new Visualisation plugin that can be easily integrated into your maven site generation as this example shows.