Eclipse Foundation pushes deeper into SOA

There's more open source support coming online for service oriented architecture-based development.

The Eclipse Foundation announced the creation of a new SOA Industry Working Group, intended to define the foundation's common Equinox-based SOA platform. As Eclipse puts it, "a common platform will enhance the interoperability between different vendor solutions and provide a technology platform for new projects that address future SOA customer requirements."

Equinox is the name of the Eclipse implementation of the OSGi R4 core framework specification, and serves as a plug-in system that enables developers to implement an application in a set of "bundles" using common services and infrastructure. OSGi provides a service-oriented plug-in-based platform for application development.

The working group consists of Engineering Group, itemis, Obeo and Sopera, who said they intend to use the Eclipse SOA platform for their own commercial solutions. The collaboration will focus on defining an 'Eclipse SOA package' that will be available for download from eclipse.org and on the definition and implementation of future requirements for the SOA platform.

Technology areas to be addressed include REST and SOAP support for OSGi remote services, and an extensible SOA framework based on open standards that provides enterprise-grade features, such as the integration of a runtime service registry and policy-based endpoint negotiation and message processing.

Business process management is also high on the working group's agenda. The group will also engage in a new extended Business Activity Monitoring (eBAM) project that will provide a platform to monitor the performance and manage analysis of external systems, as well as as a new Eclipse Business Process Management (eBPM) project will provide a complete BPM solution (tools and runtime) based on Equinox and OSGi.