Another open source-SOA monster mashup

The folks here in the ZDNet blogging world seem to be having a lot of fun with their mashups (including a sleepaway camp), and enterprise SOA is certainly evolving in that direction as well. One trend that is gaining incredible momentum is the "monster mashup" (as Vinnie Mirchandani would describe it) between the open source software movement and SOA.

The latest news on that front is the announcement by ActiveBPEL.org that it has launched the final release of version 2.0 of the ActiveBPEL engine, which includes significant improvements in performance and functionality as well as numerous bug fixes.

ActiveBPEL engine is a business process management runtime environment for executing process definitions created to the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) 1.1 spec, written in Java and released under a GPL open-source license. The tool was released into open source in July 2004 by Active Endpoints, Inc. In October 2005, Active Endpoints released metrics for ActiveBPEL, stating at that time that the engine had achieved more than 20,000 "quality" downloads (attributed directly to an operating organization or a recognized ISP), and had more than 400 registered community participants.

The product also includes support for WS-* specifications, including WS-Addressing and WS-Policy. However, a release from the organization states that support for WS-Security and WS-ReliableMessaging, originally planned for version 2.0, have been deferred until a future release.

As I observed in previous posts, there is a notable convergence taking place between open source and SOA, with a number of open-source solutions now available for SOA deployment and management, ranging from IBM's Gluecode (WebSphere Application Server) to JBoss.