The University of Hong Kong Center for E-Commerce Infrastructure Development (CECID) announced that the Observatory Service Broker (OSB) has been contributed to the open-source community website. The OSB is one of the project deliverable of Project Plumber. The OSB is an enhanced version of a process-driven enterprise service bus, which supports a choreography-based business process.

It is based on a published Java standard JSR 208: Java Business Integration (JBI). JBI is a Java-based standard addressing the EAI and B2B issues based on the paradigms and principles advocated by SOA. It defines the standards for composite plug-ins in SOA architecture, as well as how the plug-ins can communicate with each other.

Along with the OSB, there is a Business Process State Tracking (BPST) engine registering the rule sets to guide the execution of business processes and keep track the state of each rule set. The business integration SPIs enable the creation of a Java business integration environment for specifications such as WSCI, BPEL4WS, and the W3C Choreography Working Group.

OSB, BPST, and their source code have been released to CECID open-source community website under GNU General Public License Version 2. Later on, useful information and articles ranging from technical issue to general usage of OSB will be available at the community website. Commenced on March 2006, the Project Plumber aims to research and develop a software platform to facilitate enterprises to design and implement service oriented applications to transact with business partners based on key B2B standards.

The objectives of this project are to extend SOA to support processing of electronic transactions between enterprises, to develop Web Service components to support reliable and secure B2B applications based on open standards like Universal Business Language (UBL), and to develop service modeling methodology and software to facilitate design of electronic transaction services.

Read the complete announcement in Cover Pages.