Is OpenESB dead?
Jan 11, 2011 (Update): OpenESB has migrated to Project Kenai at a new location.
I decided to check to see if there are any good news from NetBeans and other Sun’s J2EE open-source projects.
On the positive side, on May 3rd, 2010, NetBeans announced the beta release of NetBeans IDE 6.9. One of the key features is indeed OSGi interoperability. The final release is planned for June 2010. On the negative side, there is no news on the dropped plug-ins for UML and SOA. I wrote already why Woodstock was dropped.
According to a comment in my blog, development of the SOA plug-in went from NetBeans to the OpenESB project (a.k.a. GlassFish ESB). It was expected to be relased with OpenESB v2.3. Although, I have not found any traces of any NetBeans plug-ins under v2.3 code. The last version (v2.2) was released on January 6, 2010, before Oracle closed the transaction to acquire Sun.
Project Fuji, which is the OpenESB v3, is expected to run on GlassFish v3 and be packaged as an OCGi bundle. This project has been quiet for about 2 months now, but it does have plug-ins not only for NetBeans, but for Eclipse as well (at least in the source code).
GlassFish v3.0.1 supporting OSGi was released in December 2009 and Oracle committed to v3.1, but did not elaborate on exact timelines. The project is active.
With regard to SOA development, right now it looks to me that Apache ServiceMix has brighter future than OpenESB does among JSR-208 compliant open-source projects. It is being actively developed. At the same time, there are no tools like NetBeans SOA plug-in to support development. Eclipse SOA is lagging. Still I do not understand why NetBeans quit that niche…
Update September 24, 2010: See some good news here.
I do not expect good news anymore – http://aglazkov.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/its-a-blow-for-java-community/ . Do you?
An interesting (about 2-years old) comparison of OpenESB and ServiceMix. http://www.predic8.com/openesb-servicemix-comparison.htm
Thanks to Kalpak – http://kalpakrg.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/good-comparison-of-openesb-and-servicemix/
I thought I’d share some finds about the future of OpenESB.
1. Feb 15, 2010. http://openesb-users.794670.n2.nabble.com/News-update-on-OpenESB-and-Oracle-td4578158.html
2. Apr 21, 2010. http://frankkieviet.blogspot.com/2010/04/openesb-under-oracle.html
Frank left Oracle to join Google. What is interesting is that private blogs have more information on open-source product Sun maintained that their project pages.
Hello,
OpenESB is still alive and will remain alive. Please read more about upcoming OpenESB summit and it’s past present and future here:
OpenESB summit details: http://www.logicoy.com/userfiles/US_OpenESB_summit.pdf
OpenESB summit sponser details: http://www.logicoy.com/userfiles/US_OpenESB_summit_Sponsor_Invitation.pdf
OpenESB: Past, Present and Future: http://www.logicoy.com/userfiles/openesb-past_present_future_news_letter.pdf
Prabhu, thank you for your post and what you are doing. After Oracle had dropped the ball on OpenESB, there was some information vacuum with pieces of confusing news. My blog has been hit heavily on OpenESB news. If we could get some consistent information about the current state of OpenESB, we would help OpenESB to survive and hopefully prosper. I know OpenESB is now hosted both at java.net on Kenai and at Openesb-dev.org (https://openesb-dev.org/) on Codendi. To make things more confusing, Oracle still offers OpenESB for download, but it is very hard to find. Thank you also for the links, I will definitely take a look.
is anything of what Oracle brought from Sun that is still alive?
OpenOffice is alive, 3.4 was released a couple of weeks ago. I guess, because it was donated to the Apache Foundation last summer. Oracle released Netbeans 7.1.2 a month ago. GlassFish Server is being developed. But it is clear, that Sun was noticeably more interested in open-source software than Oracle.