Iona's Celtix geared for SOA, departmental usage A new open source ESB (enterprise service bus) from Iona will help companies integrate departmental applications for SOAs (service-oriented architectures) and Web services deployments, according to Iona Technologies, which is sponsoring the project.Celtix 1.0 will be unveiled Monday. The Java-based ESB is hosted by the ObjectWeb Consortium and is one of a growing number of open source ESBs, in a field that includes SymphonySoft’s Mule and LogicBlaze’s ServiceMix.ESBs provide Web services-based application integration in service-oriented architectures. Celtix will run with any Java Business Integration container and features an implementation of the JAX-WS (Java API for XML Web Services) specification for building Web services-based Java applications. Multiple transports are supported in Celtix, including Java Message Service, XML, and HTTP. A SOAP stack is featured, as well.The offering is initially meant for deployments ranging between 20 to 30 services and supporting hundreds of users. “The original concept wasn’t [for Celtix to be used in] mission-critical, high-performance applications, but rather for those projects that are departmental in nature,” said Larry Alston, vice president of product management at Iona.“Celtix’s big strength is that it is a highly distributed architecture and not totally reliant on a central hub [or] stack,” said analyst Shawn Willett of Current Analysis. Celtix is available from Iona through Eclipse, GPL (GNU General Public License), or LGPL (Lesser GPL) licenses. Software Development