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.