OpenESB Migrated to Project Kenai. Right Location

The correct Open ESB project is located here and not here.

Open ESB source code is available here and Fuji source code is available here.

OpenESB, R.I.P.

Jan 10, 2011 (Update): Oracle might have incorrectly migrated OpenESB to Project Kenai. Hope to get some updates. Stay tuned.

Jan 11, 2010 (Update): I take a lot of what said below back. OpenESB has migrated to Project Kenai at a new location.

Recently I noticed a spike of hits to my blog in search for OpenESB information. The reason is simple. It looks like Oracle quietly killed OpenESB as part of its Project Kenai reorganization. Even though the move was quiet, it was blatant. Now it is impossible even to download the last version of OpenESB, even get the source code. The project is gone. I would understand Oracle’s reluctance to invest into OpenESB, but I did not expect the existing versions would not be available any longer. I feel very bad for those who used OpenESB in production environments.

But this action raises more concerns. This is a precedent how other open source projects either led by Oracle or led by Oracle can be killed with little or no warning. This action is a warning sign to those who is using Oracle open source products and care about business continuity.

Those who want to do something are welcome to join a LinkedIn group for OpenESB enthusiasts

Another Good Sign? OpenESB

I did not expect any good news about OpenESB. So I missed one. There will be an OpenESB Summit in Brussels on October 4-5, 2010.

The project governance is in the agenda. While it sounds like very encouraging, if you dig deeper in this news, you would likely get cautious for a couple of reasons. First, you cannot connect to the registration site. Second, the domain ‘openesbcommunity.org’ does not exist.

But do not give up. A Norwegian company eZ Systems AS is picking up the pieces and the new OpenESB community site is available. Pymma registered the domain. The summit registration page is here.

If you use OpenESB, raise your voice, even if you do not plan to attend the summit. I hope this is a good news for Project Fuji.

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.

NetBeans 6.7.1 Updates. UML, Woodstock, and SOA for NetBeans 6.8. Solution?

I wrote about problems getting updates for NetBeans 6.7.1. I also wrote about dropping support for UML, VisualWeb (a.k.a Woodstock), and SOA/JBI/BPEL modules in NetBeans 6.8. It looks like found a solution for both problems.

Problem 1: Unable to get beta updates for NetBeans 6.7.1 (includes VisualWeb/Woodstock, UML, SOA/JBI/BPEL, XML, Python modules and extras).

Solution: Point your “NetBeans Beta” update center from http://updates.netbeans.org/netbeans/updates/6.7.1/uc/final/beta/catalog.xml.gz to http://updates.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.7.1/fixes/2010-04-10_20-12-29/uc2/catalog.xml.gz . Please note the timestamp in the URL, hence, it may work for initial installation only. Not sure if this will work for subsequent updates.

Problem 2: NetBeans dropped support for favorite modules like VisualWeb/Woodstock, UML, SOA/JBI/BPEL.

Solution:  Point your “NetBeans Beta” update center from http://updates.netbeans.org/netbeans/updates/6.8/uc/final/beta/catalog.xml.gz to http://updates.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.8/fixes/2010-04-25_18-00-23/uc2/catalog.xml.gz . Please note the timestamp in the URL, hence, it may work for initial installation only. Not sure if this will work for subsequent updates.

Disclaimer: I have not tested these solutions yet. Please use caution.

Still no response from NetBeans.

Update (Apr 28, 2010): I got response from NetBeans about an hour after I posted this message. They are migrating the server to a new data center and right now they are using their backup servers.

Update (Apr 30, 2010): Updates are back online. The updates above are gone. On top of that I checked the UML project, and the latest commit was in January 2010. There is no guarantee that those updates would allow the UML plug-in to work in NetBeans 6.8.

Is Oracle JDeveloper Better than NetBeans?

I am looking at a declarative approach in the latest version of Oracle JDeveloper (11g). One reason why I decided to do this is to see how it compares with NetBeans (at least with version 6.7.1 that had SOA/JBI/BPEL and UML modules working) especially in light of missing modules in NetBeans 6.8. I will leave the discussion open source vs. proprietary code out of this comparison. Here are my first impressions.

First of all, I feel like I am comparing a dog with an elephant. In terms of the size of the  installation bundle, NetBeans is 232MB, JDeveloper is 969MB. But this is does not tell the full story. The JDeveloper bundle includes WebLogic Server, the NetBeans bundle includes Sun GlassFish and Apache Tomcat. Leaving bundled servers aside, JDeveloper is noticeably heavier in terms of system resource requirements (I have a separate comment related to this).

With the Oracle Fusion stack support JDeveloper requires more time to get used to it. I wish JDeveloper architects spent more on usability.

JDeveloper supports only WebLogic 10.3, JBoss 5.x, Tomcat 6.x, and WebSphere Server 7.x. I have no idea what stopped Oracle to support Sun GlassFish. On the other hand NetBeans supports GlassFish (all existing version), JBoss, WebLogic, Sailfin, Sun Java Application Server 8.2, Tomcat (v. 5.0, 5.5, 6.0).

JDeveloper has more BPEL features, but is more difficult to use. One of very interesting features is supporting human tasks to the point that JDeveloper allows to build a UI form for a user to perform the task. Sun was offering a similar functionality only via their sales team. At the same time the FTP binding component in OpenESB (and available in NetBeans) seemed more robust than the one in JDeveloper.

UML. I like so far UML modeling in JDeveloper. It does a very good job keeping the model and code in sync. May be it makes sense that Sun dropped support for the UML module. The bad news is you cannot convert your NetBeans UML models into JDeveloper UML models.

One more thing disappointed me in JDeveloper – the number of supported databases in terms of database object creation and synchronization. It supports only Oracle, DB2, Oracle Lite, MySQL, SQLServer.

Overall, I feel that if Oracle extends JDeveloper taking the best from NetBeans, it can shutter the dominance of Eclipse. But Oracle also may have to make it less restrictive and more open.

NetBeans 6.7.1, SOA/JBI/BPEL, Visual Web, and UML

This is an addition to one of my previous posts. I see many are hitting that page desperately trying to solve the problem.

I just wanted to let you know that I did uninstall NetBeans 6.8 and installed NetBeans 6.7.1 from OpenESB. I used the bundle that includes GlassFish 2.1.1, GlassFish ESB 2.2, and NetBeans 6.7.1. All attempts to add other modules to the NetBeans IDE 6.7.1 installed from a bundle from netbeans.org failed due to version conflicts. May be that was because I wanted all ESB components including FTP and email binding components. It looks like Visual Web and UML plug-ins are supported in version 6.7.1.

Is NetBeans 6.8 a Step Forward?

I decided to upgrade my NetBeans to 6.8 from 6.5. First, I was really impressed with integration with Project Kenai, but then was truly disappointed to find out that NetBeans discontinued support for SOA/JBI/BPEL, Visual Web, and UML indicating that Sun has no resources to support these features. I guess Sun Microsystems is pretty distressed. Unfortunately, NetBeans is not the only sign. The JAI (Java Advanced Imaging) mailing list that once was very active now is almost silent with subscribers asking Sun to open-source native code allowing community to develop x64 code and Sun not responding to these requrests letting JAI quietly die.

As far as I can see, Oracle’s acquisition looks like a necessity for Sun to survive as part of Oracle, not as a business opportunity to reach new horizons. Sad.

Update (Feb 22, 2010): This is what I did. I will wait for the next OpenESB release with the NetBeans 6.8 bundle.

Update (May 2, 2010): VisualWeb was discontinued for a good reason.