Don't want to swim with the SOA sharks? Here's another SOA 'fish'

If you prefer not to swim with the SOA sharks, then the less treacherous open-source variety of aquatic creature may be for you.

The latest open-source integration platform to consider is something called Swordfish, details of which were covered in thisreport in InfoWorld.

Swordfish, now under the aegis of the Eclipse Foundation, has been under development for six years at Deutsche Post. General availability is expected by the third quarter of this year.

According to InfoWorld, Swordfish features an SOA runtime platform based on Service Component Architecture (SCA), Java Business Integration (JBI), and Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi). The Swordfish developer blog can be found here.

The fact that this platform has been under development in a live production setting for six years is a real plus. Of course, Deutsche Post is a huge organization, and it will be interesting to see how it can be adapted to smaller operations.

The introduction of open-source tools and platforms for SOA, from Swordfish to Red Hat JBoss to MuleSource to FUSE to Glassfish (another kinder and gentler aquatic creature), are indicators that SOA is ready for companies that have been ignored thus far by the SOA vendors, because small to medium-size companies simply don't have the budgets for service-oriented transformations. They prefer to service-orient one project at a time.