I blogged a while back about our acquisition of the Rosetta ESB. As mentioned by others, we've made significant progress on our SOA story over the past few months. With the release of JBossESB 4.0 Beta1, we're making another important statement to our customers and community: Redhat+JBoss is a powerful combination in the SOA space.

Looking specifically at JBossESB, we spent a lot of time and effort working with customers on our architecture and the Rosetta code donation has helped us to start to deliver on the goals. The fact that it has been in production use for 3 solid years is a critical component in the solution for our customers. It has a pedigree associated with it that is impossible to come by any other way: for any software system/application to be solid and reliable, it needs to be deployed, run and tested. This beta release may not be precisely where we want to be, but then what beta release is? It is fair to say that for this release we have concentrated on getting the core right, setting the foundation on which to build the product release. So don't expect lots of bells and whistles, but do expect a good offering.

The list of things to look out for in this beta release include:

• Support for ageneral notification framework. Transports supported include JMS (JBossMQ, JBoss Messaging and MQSeries), email, database or file system.
• A great trailblazer example. Check this out before doing anything else, as it's a good way to set the scene for the rest of the documentation.
• Support for data transformations.
• The concept of a listeners and action model to support loose-coupling of interaction steps. Again, check the trailblazer for how simple this is to use.
• A durable object repository.
• High performance and reliability.
• Built on JBossAS 4.0.4 and EJB3.

One thing I definitely don't want to let slip by un-noticed is that this ESB is truly a release build by the community and for the community. We've got a great team, composed of full-time employees as well as community members. The forum has always been active and this has helped us develop the ESB. Many of the forum contributors have subsequently joined the team in one way or another. I have been very impressed with the way in which the team has pulled together in this effort and I think it bodes well for the future!