Sujit has published a blog entry showing a nice example of how to easily leverage Spring DM within OpenESB v3 / Project Fuji; both to either expose a service, or to call existing services on the "bus". The "bus" (a.k.a. normalized message router) adds the option of a message based, loosely coupled and asynchronous contract to an OSGi environment such as Felix or GlassFish v3. The simple API mechanism allows the (interface centric) OSGi services to implement and invoke message based services. Fuji then includes a host of advanced constructs, including the ability to route, transform and augment these messages. The sample application bundle as well as instructions on installing the Spring DM bundles is available on the Fuji wiki.

Lots of exciting developments in the GlassFish ESB world; hot on the heels of the GlassFish ESB v2 release candidate with its enterprise features and commercial support we're also showing that we have more big plans for the evolution of this platform. With Milestone 3 of Project Fuji we give you the keys to test drive some of the platform enhancements we're working on for GlassFish ESB.next and allow you to be an active participant in driving the direction.

If you haven't been following Project Fuji closely you might be interested to know that there is both an "evolutionary" and "revolutionary" side; Adapters and Containers from v2 also are used in Fuji, and applications built in v2 deploy and run on Fuji. Where we're innovating is in looking at the productivity in every layer; ensuring we are tops in flexibility, agility and ease of use.

Milestone 3 of Project Fuji introduces a (dare I say very cool) web based tooling option for composing services.

Check out the Fuji Milestone 3 Screencast which shows how to use simple drag and drop in a browser to easily build the same scenario that was built in Milestone 2 via the domain specific language "IFL" for composing services.

It's worth noting that the web tooling builds on top of the domain specific language and hence round tripping is easy; you can for example check out the project built in the browser from subversion and edit it in your IDE of choice, just as shown in milestone 2.

This gets us one step closer to the mantra of Fuji: Productivity through flexibility, agility, and ease of use.

• In terms of flexibility this expands your tooling choices
• For agility you might notice the "automatically save and deploy" option which is one step towards our goal of making it very light weight to develop, test and correct your application as you go along
• For ease of use the simple way of visually modeling enterprise integration patterns and simple properties dialogs go a long way

All community members interested in technical discussion of new OpenESB features are invited to participate in the OpenESB Innovation Series meetings. The first installment is this Wednesday (September 24, 2008) at 9am PT and features a presentation on Distributed OpenESB - adding a heterogenous option.

The meeting features presentations and peer reviews where community members present research, innovative new features, projects and prototypes.

These highly interactive peer reviews are complementary to webinars such as the GlassFish technical webinars. See you there!

The first milestone release of GlassFish ESB is now available. It’s a big step for Project OpenESB: GlassFish ESB is a binary distribution of a subset of OpenESB that will be commercially supported by Sun Microsystems.

Commercial support for an open source project is an important step in its evolution: most companies require commercial support before they will deploy an open source project. That is no different for OpenESB.

OpenESB has seen tremendous growth in the past few years, and with Sun’s commercial support in place, OpenESB will be able to go to the next phase of growth.

As an active and healthy open source community there will always be new innovation and components in various stages of their lifecycle, only components that meet the quality critera and testing as well as the systemic qualities required for a production system are worthy of inclusion in the GlassFish ESB distribution. Obviously other components available in the community will still run on this distribution as well.

Check it out at https://open-esb.dev.java.net/glassfishesb/. A getting-started-quickly guide and video are available on that page too, as well as a detailed timeline. The preview form is available now with the final release due in November 2008.

Help us make the product better by trying out the download and giving us feedback on the users mailing list!

A compilation of today's news of interest: