fyi JBoss aims high with Enterprise Middleware System

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,98201,00.html?source=NLT_WS&nid=98201

Kobielus kommentary:
Yeah, they aim high, but they're missing the target by a mile. JBoss’ “Enterprise Middleware System”’s jBPM v2 is not a full-featured, competitive integration broker (aka orchestration engine, BPM engine, workflow engine, choreography engine--pick your synonym). It’s more of a placeholder for an integration strategy that JBoss is still cobbling together. jBPM v2 includes a core orchestration engine, but it lacks support for WS-BPEL, lacks a visual process designer, and lacks a portal-integration human workflow component. On the positive side, JBoss plans to add all of this missing functionality over the next 1-2 years. Also on the positive, this is an open-source orchestration engine that will run in any Java Virtual Machine (including Apache Tomcat’s servlet engine or any third-party J2EE app server). It will doubtless find its way into many Java-oriented integration projects, but as a toolkit that requires additional componentry sourced and/or developed elsewhere. Contrary to the subhead in this article, it won’t compete directly with the much more mature, multifunctional, best-of-breed integration offerings from IBM, BEA, Oracle, and others. At least not for the next 2-3 years. And contrary to what JBoss’ VP says in the article, BEA, IBM, and other integration-broker vendors don’t provide “all of nothing” offerings. Like JBoss, they provide runtime orchestration engines, resource adapters, development tools, portals, and other components that can be deployed and integrated modularly in various configurations. Those other, established platform/middleware vendors simply provide more multifunctional, robust, mature, enterprise-grade offerings in all of these categories than does JBoss. And, as Richard M-H notes, they provide many more resource adapters than JBoss. Those are the sine qua non of all integration products. Stay tuned to JBoss for interesting announcements over the coming year, regarding where they’re going with jBPM. They’ve got an interesting roadmap, but they’re just warming up the car. They haven’t really pulled out of the garage yet.

Jim