| "Iona was finding itself incorporating LogicBlaze's technology into its Celtix open source ESB already. According to Larry Alston, vice president of corporate strategy and product development, the deal was rooted in Iona's move last year to move its Celtix open source project from ObjectWeb to Apache." " "At that time we began to expand the scope of Celtix to incorporate technology form other open source projects," he said." "That meant stretching Celtix to support other lighter-weight containers beyond the J2EE one that it started with. Iona wanted to broaden support to alternative containers such as Spring, which is run by Interface21, and ServiceMix, a project run by LogicBlaze that was hosted by Apache." "For Iona, the quest for lighter-weight containers was a bit personal. "We learned a lot from our experience with Orbix," said Alston." "Iona's Orbix was probably the best-known commercial implementation of CORBA, a component architecture that was one of the first implementations of a services-oriented architecture, before it was so named. While ahead of its time, CORBA suffered from its complexity and significant computing overhead." "More recently, developers have been defecting from J2EE to alternative frameworks like Spring for similar reasons, and this time, Iona wanted to be on the train before it left the station." "Consequently, as Iona began extending Celtix, ServiceMix and ActiveMQ, an open source implementation of JMS (not IBM's MQSeries) that was also developed by LogicBlaze and hosted at Apache, became part of the list of technologies that Iona wanted to add." "Late last year, Iona released Celtix Enterprise, which added support for ServiceMix and ActiveMQ, plus a grab bag of other open source goodies like the Spring container, Tomcat, and Eclipse-based tooling supporting Java Business Integration." "Consequently, acquisition of LogicBlaze is all about recruiting experts rather than getting technology, which was already available as open source." ""The reason we're excited about getting these people is that they know how to interact with the open source community," Alston said." "LogicBlaze is one of a string of open source entities under the Simula Labs holding company founded by Winston Damarillo, the person who sold GlueCode to IBM (which became WebSphere Application Server Community Edition)." "The acquisition of LogicBlaze comes on the heels of last month's acquisition of C24, which added data transformation to Artix, Iona's other ESB product, which is not open source." "Consequently, with two ESB product lines, it's easy to get confused about Iona's product strategy because, at this point,
... read the whole article |