O.k., Jonathan, I apologize yet again, i got emotional, and you trumped me with the virtualization announcement, i’ll let you live, i am still down on a lot of things, but you may have something with the xVM product-line, i think it will be a tough sell to the sales force, for them to comprehend how to position it, but i see your logic, so mea culpa, i’ll take a step back from the brink, and let you do some work around that announcement, maybe you know what you are doing…You had better send a nice e-mail, though, to your Glassfish team, because they are absolutely killing it right now, as evidenced from the announcement around Glassfish ESB:https://open-esb.dev.java.net/glassfishesb/ and:https://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=50684I have some ideas that i want to float by the community of Sun followers, ESB players, Java developers, and general interest readers, so bear with me, as i lay out the battle-plan for a JBI-influenced middleware strategy, something that, no doubt, Mr. Bauhaus thought about long-ago when he brought together this specification, but it probably needs a new characterization to get things going again, and this time, make it sustainable for all the constituencies involved, here we go… Maybe i have discussed this in a previous post, i know i have gone around and around with Dave and team at MuleSource (good luck, Dave, on the new venture in to the cloud), so i am going to try and not do too much of the value proposition of JBI and rather just assume competence with the readers of this entry, that by-and-large understand that a standard means moving on with business, and not having to explain so many things that a non-standard implementation must go over with customers and developers, that is the thing that i have been hammering Mule on, that it is just a waste of time to argue that speeds and feeds matter more than a standard to follow, so lets move on, we all agree here that JBI is the way to go, its just a matter of time before all ESBs get on-board, absent any new development in the standards process, and i know that Oracle and IBM may join Microsoft in ignoring the JBI specification, but everyone else will be there, sooner or later (hows that for a statement and a run-on sentence)…It is important to go on the second link that i provide above and see Frank’s response to my question about compensation and how developers and vendors can work with Sun on the distribution of the Glassfish ESB which is a productized effort coming out of the openESB community: it is a very encouraging development, because it is Sun’s and perhaps the industry’s first foray in to a model of truly pushing revenue out to the partners, in this case JBI developers, instead of clamoring to maintain all revenue in-house, it is in short, Sun’s largest competitive advantage over IBM Global Services and Oracle Fusion, that they can begin to build an army of experts that will build solutions that can be supported by Sun Services, Sun PS, and Sun GSO, this is a major development…I am not going to spell-out the value proposition of JBI, but i am going to spell out the benefits of working with Sun on the Glassfish ESB, even if it is potentially obvious to some of you…first, just like the economics of the application server market initially, the developer community does not have to worry about the pain and effort of ‘rolling-your-own’ and can just rely on the distro. of the ESB to take care of most of the infrastructure plumbing and build solutions on top of it…second, there is obvious scale advantages in working with Sun even as they do not co-opt all the revenue, as may happen with working with IBM due to Global Services or with Oracle due to their fanatical need to maintain licensing margins on Fusion, and Sun can take partners in to all corners of the worldwide IT market, and you don’t have to build offices in Sri Lanka or Texas, you can just get on-board with Sun’s global presence and pick-and-choose your moments where you over-invest in certain accounts…. most importantly, it is the ability to grow account presence based on innovation as opposed to proprietary upgrades, where the customer knows that they will not be locked-in, and will be able to rely on inter-operable components from different vendors that should by-and-large work together…at this point, i should be hearing from the negative nay-sayers who claim that standards are never perfect and do not allow inter-operability let alone portability, well, i just have one response to that, and that is that it is infinitely more reliable than say the Spring model where you have to carry along the Spring platform in order to maintain compliance…in this case, with JBI, you can write to the specification that happens to be community organized and driven, and maintain a level of abstraction away from a specific vendor…maybe i am being naive and there is always some level of power that is being given to the sponsor of a standard, in other words, which vendor, Sun or SpringSource, is more altruistic, i guess only time will tell, but at this point, if there is even one additional vendor supporting JBI, that is an improvement on what Spring, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, or Mule can offer…So, what have i missed, is this the realization, on the back-end of a dream that i have talked about was my initial motivation for getting involved in the application server market back in 1999, and why i pushed so hard for an independent market of EJB components?…has JBI achieved what EJB has so-far failed to do – – to turn the economics of Java developers in to a true competitive advantage over Microsoft’s model of ubiquity?…are we at the precipice of making plug-and-play on the ESB as easy as it sounds?…or will there be a new effort within Sun to dilute the promise of standards turning power over to the developers?…i have a lot of confidence in the people running Glassfish, and so i am willing to state that this is the single biggest opportunity for Java developers in the 10 years that Enterprise Java has been chugging along: bigger than WebLogic initially, bigger than writing JBoss apps, and ultimately on-par with the value proposition of Visual Studio and .Net, there is real money to be made with Glassfish ESB – – can anyone else in the middleware market make such a claim?… Java