Red Hat boosts open source SOA

Red Hat is expanding its open-source JBoss SOA platform with the unveiling Wednesday of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3 and JBoss Operations Network 2.1.

Enterprise SOA Platform supports small-integration projects to enterprise-wide SOA integration. It features open-source projects like JBoss ESB, JBoss JBPM, and JBoss Rules.

“[The product] is designed to integrate services in an SOA and then orchestrate services into processes that can be automated,” Pierre Fricke, Red Hat director for SOA product line management, said. “It’s basically an SOA integration platform based on an SOA.”

SOA Platform 4.3 offers ESB features including gateway listeners, a declarative security model and improved Web services integration. Additional scripting languages are supported, enabling development of services in Jython, JRuby, and BeanShell. These languages enable non-Java programmers to build services, Fricke said.

Version 4.3 can be administered by JBoss Operations Network 2.1, which also is being introduced Wednesday and supports patch management, start-stop monitoring, and other capabilities.

With version 4.3, stateful rules services decision tables and rule agent support further enable business event processing and an event-driven architecture, Red Hat said. Also, non-developers can construct business rules.

Among the other capabilities of JBoss Operations Network 2.1 is centralized management including inventory, administration, deployment and updating of JBoss Enterprise Middleware products and subsystems. Remote platform configuration and deployment and automatic ESB service inventory discovery are offered as well, along with JBoss ESB service monitoring.

JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3 and JBoss Operations Network 2.1 are expected to ship by the end of October.

Prices of the two products vary based on configuration. A 32-CPU configuration costs $135,000 for a subscription featuring 24-by-7 support services