I'm pleased to share that Master Index support of MySQL is now available in the Mural Community. See the announcement and go get the bits to try it out. The MySQL support is in both the stable and nightly builds.

This is an important milestone as it allows the community to now adopt an MDM solution without requiring an expensive and closed source database. MySQL has always been supported as a source of information to be indexed, but with this development the index itself can now use MySQL.

This is also the first step in delivering this support for our customers of the MDM Suite and Java CAPS. Stay tuned!

For the 10th consecutive year, Sun has achieved SWIFT certification. Read more here.

There has been quite a bit of open-source news the past week or so.

First, OpenSSO Express was announced at OSCON last week. This provides support for milestone builds from the OpenSSO community to licensees of Access Manager giving even greater flexibility to organizations looking to take advantage of open-source development and innovation. We think this model can apply to Java CAPS and Open ESB as well so let us know what you think!

Second, we announced an Enterprise LAMP Stack for Solaris and Linux, including the open-sourcing of the core components of our Web Server and Web Proxy offerings under the BSD license.

Last, Jonathan blogged about open-source and LinkedIn's use of MySQL. I particularly liked this paragraph:

"I'm seeing this with nearly every customer I meet, the invisible hand of open source - communities of individuals equally devoted to their employers, and to personal and peer productivity. These communities, within companies as well as across industries, are solving problems without having to involve procurement (while religiously adhering to policies surrounding privacy, intellectual property protection and software licensing). They're delivering unquestionable value."

as well as:

"Most progressive CIO's are trying to embrace this trend rather than fight it, figuring out how they can mandate as little as possible, not as much as possible - selecting only the most critical policies and standards to drive efficiency or compliance."

We are in a new open-source world and it is time to embrace it. You can do so by joining any number of our communities whether it is GlassFish, Open ESB, Mural, OpenSSO, OpenDS, OpenSolaris, or others.

We've recently updated the Inside SOA pages and content to deliver news and information more quickly to take advantage of multi-media and other new methods for connecting with our customers and community. There you will find links to Inside SOA TV, Inside SOA Podcasts, and our Inside SOA blog.

Of particular note, take a look at the Inside SOA TV as we have some new content and videos from JavaOne and the Gartner AADI conference where we had not one, but two customers speak.

We are increasingly using the blog as a way to communicate news and notes more regularly without filling up folks inboxes, so do take a look at that and consider pointing your favorite RSS reader (I happen to use Thunderbird's built in one and like it) at it so you will be notified of our new entries right away.

It has now been a week since we launched the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS) Release 6 so I thought I'd share some of the feedback we are getting from the press and analysts

Many of the reports just regurgitate our press release and thus aren't terribly interesting. Several have gone into more depth though including:

Sun Releases JCAPS 6 with MDM Suite - John Waters from ADT quotes Dan Sholler of Gartner as saying "The attitude toward open source has definitely changed in the recent past. More companies are taking open source solutions seriously for mission critical situations. Sun might be poised to take advantage of that change."

Sun Java CAPS chugs down SOA open source track - Rich Seeley of SearchSOA.com writes an article with quotes from us as well as Brad Shimmin from Current Analysis saying "The two most important things in addition to the JBI modularization are Sun's shipment of an MDM suite that is itself JBI-based and built on top of the company's ESB as well as its CEP tool, which is built into the ESB suite".

Sun bolsters SOA software with data management - Paul Krill focuses on our new MDM Suite.

Sun touts open integration platform - Rosalie Marshall quotes Neil Ward-Dutton from Macehiter Ward-Dutton "Now Sun is showing remaining SeeBeyond Customers it still has a commitment to the integration software". And to his comment that Java CAPS is too large for small and medium sized companies and the community, that is what our ESB Suite and Open ESB are for!

Sun Unveils Java CAPS 6, Master Data Management Suite - IT News Online quotes Java CAPS customer Vince Blanchard from Medavie Blue Cross saying "Lock-in with any vendor is a top concern for us. Sun's implementation of the pluggable Java Business Integration (JBI) standard combined with its open source strategy within Open ESB and Java CAPS have addressed this concern for us."

I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that my flight is woefully delayed (5:30 scheduled departure, now supposed to be 9:44), but the good news is that it gives me a chance to capture some of my observations from JavaOne (ok, I tend to be an optimist :))

I spent the last 4 days attending CommunityOne and then JavaOne. I also managed to sneak in going to the Cardinal Invitational track meet Sunday evening but that is another forthcoming blog entry.

CommunityOne was great, with more attendees this year than last (a free event the day before thousands of developers descend upon San Francisco tends to result in growth) and some exciting news about OpenSolaris 200805. Yes, it appears Sun is reverting to year/month release naming, at least in this case, but I think it makes sense where you have more of a milestone release cadence as figuring out what is a major or minor release is not an issue this way. Regardless of what it is called, it does look very exciting and I'm in the process of installing it on my Mac in a VirtualBox VM. In fact, it really is installing as I write this! More on this in another forthcoming blog entry.

Tuesday brought JavaOne and Sun's keynote. I tried to twitter (tweet?) during the event so you can see some observations here, Amazon showed up to show off the Kindle, and I must say I'm surprised it isn't color. Yes, written text tends to be black and white, but books and rich media today (it can show images/photos/etc.) isn't, so this seems like a shortcoming. There were a number of very sexy looking JavaFX demos building upon what was announced at JavaOne last year. There were also announcements about the latest and greatest Java SE 6 updates including a "consumer" one that will make the footprint of Java SE smaller making it more accessible to more folks and devices which will only help getting Java FX on more devices.

Tuesday also brought the opening of the JavaOne Pavilion where we had pods for Java CAPS, our new open-source MDM community Mural, Event Processing, and our next generation lighter weight and OSGi compliant JBI runtime that is part of Project Fuji in Open ESB. Fuji introduces anew way to map out integration flows in a simple declarative language. On Wednesday I managed to attend a great session by Andi and Keith on Fuji.

I also had the opportunity to speak with several analysts and press about what we are doing in open-source and with Java CAPS and received very favorable feedback. I was pleased to see several of the folks I spoke with showing up at some of the sessions on our technologies and projects.

So, now I sit here waiting for my flight (10 minutes to boarding supposedly), but am glad I was able to attend another great JavaOne. In a way I'm already looking forward to next year when we'll get to show more about Fuji, event processing, and who knows what else. Stay tuned!

I'm probably not breaking any news by noting that JavaOne is next week. I'm probably not breaking news noting what is happening at the event related to our SOA and Business Integration technologies either, but at least some of you might find it interesting or informative.

Actually, before JavaOne is CommunityOne, the free event on the day before JavaOne. We will have demos for Mural, our new open-source community for Master Data Management (MDM), so stop on by.

For JavaOne itself there is a host of activity. There are a bunch of sessions in the SOA and Enterprise Integration track and in the Pavilion there will be 4 pods covering Java CAPS (pod 170), Open ESB (pod 171), Event Driven SOA (pod 179), and Mural (pod 180).

I and many others from our Product Management and Engineering teams will be there, so stop by and say hi!

I came across and article from a Java Developers Journal e-mail titled "In the Future, the Desktop Will Become the Enterprise Front End - Enterprise Widgets: The Story So Far" that I found very interesting. It covers a bit of history of widgets on the desktop and how Apple first introduced the idea in 1983, but it was really the internet that enabled offerings like Konfabulator (Yahoo! Widgets) and Apple's own Dashboard.

It goes on to discuss the applicability of widgets in the enterprise but makes several observations that sound eerily familiar to those working on Open ESB:

"What is needed is an enterprise widget ecosystem. The ecosystem would have to be portable across the most common desktop operating systems and it would need to be backend agnostic."

and:

"At the same time, however, the ability to link widgets together so that widgets can act as data feeds for other widgets ... is also important."

and:

"For one thing each widget could evolve separately so that you could update functionality without having to do a huge application release. The narrow focus of widgets also makes testing, maintenance, and development a lot easier."

All of this is exactly what Open ESB is doing, just around an integration platform, rather than for desktop widgets.

• There is an ecosystem developing components ranging from BPEL and XSLT Service Engines to RSS and XMPP Binding Components according to the JBI specification providing for portability across runtimes.
• JBI enables the components to connect together in a standards based way so that a developer can say use any Binding Component to feed data to the Intelligent Event Processor Service Engine or any other combination one can think of.
• Many of the components are being developed in a common community, and some in other communities or by other vendors, but all can evolve and mature on their own schedule, and because they plug in to a standards based platform they can be released or made available as they are ready without having to have a full release of everything else.

Our customers of the Java Composite Application Platform Suite will soon realize these benefits as our upcoming release aligns with the development taking place in Open ESB.

Pluggability rules!

I recently wrote about the benefits of open-source but as I was reading Jonathan's blog on OpenSolaris, Security, and the NSA I was reminded of another huge benefit of open-source.

Specifically, the transparency of open-source helps ensure that the code is secure, or if not, that issues can be found and fixed right away without the vendor sitting on them until it is convenient to release or there is enough uproar to fix the issue sooner. As Bill Vaas said in Jonathan's blog:

"... one of the great benefits of being an open source company is that Sun can innovate out in the open, within a very large community. For security technologies in particular, transparency of development is absolutely vital, even for the NSA - you can't sneak trojan horses into open source platforms. So open source allows high security customers to trust vendors *and* verify."

Is open-source "freetarded"? I just ran across an article by Christopher Keene pointing out that open-source has to be about more than free and that vendors have to start thinking that way. And he is absolutely correct!

If software is only free, you are addressing only part of having software be valuable and having a low TCO. As the article above points out, if you can't get the software installed and working, or you can't find talent to be able to work with the software, that "free" software starts to get pretty expensive.

In order to fully deliver on the promise of open-source, software must have three qualities:

1. Free and easy access - This is kind of assumed with open-source, but must be stated so we don't forget it. For most users it isn't about the source, but rather is about free and easy access to a binary or distribution. While I have to confess that I have downloaded source and built my own binaries for a variety of apps and even newer versions of Linux kernels (and I'm probably even proud of this fact), most users don't have the aptitude or desire to do that, so having binaries is a must.
2. Easy to use - This is extremely important and sometimes forgotten with open-source projects. If you download something and can't get it installed, or after installation can't get it configured or working, you can end up wasting a significant amount of time losing the "free" aspect of the software. Worse, if that initial experience is bad you may not come back again to try it and worse yet, word of mouth and hmmm, blogging, can spread the word about a product being difficult to use very quickly.
3. Vibrant community - This last piece is also very important. Without it you don't get the collaboration and feedback that help drive innovation and help make the software better. Furthermore, if there is no community, adoption suffers and that leads to small pools of talent resulting in higher costs for organizations wanting to use the software.

You only have to look as far as the Apache Web Server and Apache Tomcat, or more recently GlassFish to see examples of where these three qualities have led to successful open-source projects that have had and are gaining widespread adoption and use and have driven down TCO for organizations that are implementing the software. And while it isn't as large or mature as those mentioned, Open ESB is also applying the qualities to create a successful open-source project.

A related question that deserves its own blog entry but I'll mention here is, if software is free, how does a vendor make any money off it? See Mark's blog from some recent interaction with our customers to see their views on paying for "free" open-source software, and stay tuned for more on the subject.

I've blogged about Project Open ESB several times before (here, here, and here), but it is been awhile so I thought I'd give an update.

The community continues to grow with many Sun and non-Sun committers collaborating together, some individuals, and some representing companies and community partners. A few key partners that have contributed numerous components are Imola and Gestalt LLC (recently acquired by Accenture). Imola is working on CICS and CORBA Binding Components and Gestalt is working on RSS, SIP, UDDI, and XMPP Binding Components as well as Encoding Service Engine.

You will have noticed some interesting looking components in the list, probably not the typical type of adapters you'd expect to see for a traditional integration offering. But that is what is great about community and open-source development as well as a testament to what a platform built on an open standard like JBI enables. Anyone can build a component for whatever protocol, system, or function they desire and have it plug into the platform and benefit from everything else that also plugs into the platform. Additionally, this is an indication that "traditional integration" is changing to adapt to the "Web 2.0" world and protocols that it brings. Just think about the applications for incorporating RSS and XMPP into your integration or composite applications.

But it isn't just about components from community partners. Sun is building numerous components from BPEL 2.0 and XSLT Service Engines to a variety of Binding Components for JDBC, JMS, E-mail, SAP, and more. A particularly interesting new Service Engine is the Intelligent Event Processor that provides for receiving and processing real-time events to aggregate, correlate, and monitor them to support a variety of new applications built on an Event Driven Architecture. And because it is a JBI component, and can benefit from all the Binding Components as a way to receive events and send notifications and it doesn't have to have custom mechanisms for that.

There are many more components being developed so visit the site and take a look. We welcome all feedback so I encourage you to download a recent build, try it out, and collaborate with the community at what ever level you'd like.

It has been a busy news day!

To start with, the on/off again BEA acquisition by Oracle is now on again. See my previous post for what this could mean, but it is still early and there are many questions about what it is going to mean to Oracle's middleware and both Oracle and BEA customers. Some of the early quotes are interesting however.

Larry Ellison says at one point:

"...customers can choose among Oracle and BEA middleware products, knowing that those products will gracefully interoperate and be supported for years to come.”

This sounds like they are acknowledging that they have overlap and that they don't plan on rationalizing that overlap for "years to come".

Alfred Chuang states:

“our two businesses are a natural fit.”

but then says the companies will work on a

“comprehensive integration plan”

It all seems a bit confusing with products continuing for years to come, but being a natural fit, but needing a comprehensive integration plan. We will all be interested to see what happens.

The other big news of course is Sun's acquisition of MySQL. There has been a lot written on this of course including:

• Sun acquires MySQL; Adds to its software stack
• Sun's Acquisition of MySQL Validates Open Source Model
• Sun and MySQL: A $1 billion vote for open-source

I'm excited about it as it will provide a variety of opportunities for the Java Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS) which is Sun's SOA and Composite Application product offering. With MySQL, Sun now has a complete software stack from the operating system to Java to Software Infrastructure (i.e. middleware) including an application server, identity products, and an integration platform with Java CAPS, the majority already in open source with nearly all new development taking place in open source. This last point is a key differentiator against the competition.

Stay tuned for updates on how the MySQL acquisition can create more value for Java CAPS customers.

In a recent report, Current Analysis ranks Sun's SOA offering #1 among the SOA Suites they analyzed.

Click here to see a chart showing how the various vendors rank in their report.

While they highlight the offering as the Sun Java Enterprise System, the heart of the SOA support in Java ES is the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite, or Java CAPS. It provides for the underlying integration/ESB, service enablement, service composition and orchestration, and business process management, and leverages other components of Java ES for the runtime (Application Server), security (Access Manager and Directory), and presentation (Portal Server).

It is interesting to note that in the abstract they say "...customers require software products that are marketed as a single suite, with unified tooling, management and often installation and configuration utilities" which is a key differentiator of Java CAPS. It was built from the ground up to be an integrated and unified offering with a common IDE, runtime, installer, management environment, and more.

• Sun Microsystems is back in the game - They got the year of acquisition wrong, but make some nice statements about the SeeBeyond acquisition positioning Sun in the integration/SOA space.
• Eight reasons SaaS will surge in 2008 - Some very good points, especially the connection between SaaS and SOA.
• R.I.P. Netscape - A quick history lesson in the rise and fall of Netscape.
• Should Mozilla go public? In a word: No. - Interesting given the demise of Netscape.
• Is Bangalore no longer a cost-saving location? - Interesting trend.

The latest edition of "Sun Good News" has a mention of easycash GmbH's use of Java CAPS. Specifically:

After deploying the Sun Java™ Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS), easycash GmbH was able to integrate its business process applications 6x faster than with manual programming, and expects future integrations to be even faster. “We needed a flexible and scalable solution,” says Klaus Brück, head of payment services at easycash. “Java CAPS enables us to implement new requirements more efficiently and therefore shorten the time until product launch.”

Read more in the customer snapshot on sun.com.