Last week, I had the pleasure of chatting with some senior technical people from Infor, the third largest ERP vendor. The topic of the conversation was Infor’s use of Eclipse Virgo as the base technology for their next generation middleware platform, called ION. ION is event-driven middleware that makes it easy for Infor’s customer to connect their business applications. ION has already been rolled out to some of Infor’s customers and is an important technology platform going forward for the company.
This is a great case study for using Eclipse Virgo. Infor started out using plain Equinox 3.5 but then migrated to the Virgo Kernel 2.1 when they realized the extra capabilities provided by Virgo. They have added their own integrations to Virgo, including JDBC, Web Services (SOAP, REST), JMS, JCA, XMPP and File system. Below is their architecture diagram for ION:
This is also an other example of a company using EclipseRT technology, like Virgo, to create component-based architectures and platforms that are easy to integrate and extend. In time, given the size of Infor’s customer based, it could become one of the largest deployments of Virgo.
Kudos, to Glyn and the Virgo project team. Thank you to the Infor team for sharing what they have done. Great to see!!
