Sun Microsystems has joined with Java technology leaders to announce the availability of the Early Draft Review of the Java Business Integration (JBI) Specification, Java Specification Request (JSR) 208.
The group also announced that Apache Group, IONA and JBoss have joined the effort, which is dedicated to developing an open standard for business integration on the Java platform. The specification extends the Java platform to incorporate standardised integration capabilities, and marks an important milestone in enabling Java technology use based on service-oriented architecture (SOA).
The JSR 208 project, which is chaired by Sun, is being jointly developed through the Java Community Process (JCP) programme by over 22 prominent vendors and individual developers of Integration and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology. In addition to the three new members, these include Novell, Oracle, SAP AG, SeeBeyond, Sonic Software, Sybase, Tibco Software, and webMethods.
"The goal of the Java Business Integration initiative is to do for the integration space what J2EE did for the field of Java application development and deployment: namely, deliver the benefits of choice, flexibility, interoperability, code reuse, reduced complexity and lower cost", says Sean O'Hare, Java systems engineer at Sun Microsystems SA. "The Early Draft Review of JSR 208 shows our commitment to develop this technology in an open and standards-based way through the Java Community Process."
Implementations based on JBI will provide IT organisations with higher levels of portability and reuse of integration technologies not achievable with many of today's integration products. Java Business Integration components such as business process engines based on the BPEL (business process engineering language) specification, rules engines, and routing and transformation engines from multiple vendors can be easily combined into a single solution, reducing the cost of application integration and enabling best-of-breed solutions.
The Early Draft of the JSR 208 specification is available at www.jcp.org for industry comment. It defines a unified, pluggable architecture for building integration technology on the Java platform and specifies standard interfaces for integration components like BPEL engines, transformation engines, or routing engines, to be plugged seamlessly into an integration container.O'Hare explains: "JBI gives businesses the ability to assemble a best-of-breed solution, or to extend their integration solutions by adding new integration components. The high level of flexibility, choice and extensibility in JBI will lead to more robust integration solutions with 'reduced vendor lock-in and lower costs."
Additionally, by building upon Java standards, JSR 208 allows developers to capitalise on their Java and J2EE development skills, to reduce the time and effort required to solve complex integration problems. JSR 208 also defines a shared service oriented architecture messaging facility that is the foundation for standards-based SOA.
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