The swordfish (xiphias gladius) uses its sharp elongated bill to slash through its prey making sushi of smaller fish. Likewise, the advocates of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform codenamed Swordfish, which is now making its way through the Eclipse incubator process, argue it will slash through obstacles to SOA development. Those obstacles include political infighting between advocates of the Java Business Integration (JBI) and Service Component Architecture (SCA) specifications as well as features missing in the Java Enterprise Edition (JEE), said Ricco Deutscher, CTO at SOPERA GmbH, a spinoff of Deutsche Post AG. The parent company developed its own SOA platform to handle logistics applications. Deutscher is now leading the open sourcing of the Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi)-based SOA platform in Eclipse.

In the third quarter of this year, Swordfish is scheduled to emerge from incubation as the SOA runtime integrated with Eclipse SOA Tools Project (STP) and the Web Tools Project (WTP), Deutscher said. Swordfish will also make the best use of both JBI and SCA, ending that rivalry, and employ OSGi to replace Java EE and even Spring. In Deutscher's view of Swordfish, SCA provides a common programming model and a common description format. JBI provides a common messaging model. OSGi provides a common deployment model and a common runtime component model. [From the Swordfish web site:] "The goal of the Swordfish project is to provide an extensible SOA framework that can be complemented by additional open source or commercial components such as a service registry, a messaging system, a BPEL engine etc. to form a comprehensive open source SOA runtime environment based on both established and emerging open standards. The framework shall be usable for a wide range of applications -- from embedded systems to enterprise environments."

Read the complete article by Rich Seeley, SearchSOA.com and the Swordfish announcement.