Project #7 is my ongoing series of new projects on the release train is Swordfish. Oliver Wolf is the project leader of Swordfish and he was kind enough to participate in the series.
What does your project do?
The goal of the Swordfish project is to provide an extensible SOA framework based on the proven Eclipse Equinox runtime technology. The framework is designed to be complemented by additional open source components such as a service registry, a messaging system, a process engine etc. to form a comprehensive open source SOA runtime environment based on both established and emerging open standards.
Who are your typical users?
We currently address two types of users. First of all, application developers seeking a more modular and reusable alternative to classical client/server architectures will probably find the SOA approach beneficial and can use the tools that come with Swordfish to easily create their own service implementations. Secondly, since Swordfish is an extensible framework, users who require a customized SOA runtime solution can extend the framework with plugins for different aspect such as configuration, policy-based message processing etc.
Why did you join the Galileo release train? After completing your first release train, what do you think now?
Swordfish joined the Galileo release train to improve its visibility in the Eclipse ecosystem and help grow the community. Being part of the simultaneous release reduces the entrance barrier for developers new to SOA and hopefully gives us the feedback we need to make the further development of Swordfish really community driven.
The last few months have been a great learning experience for us (although painful at times). The effort involved in participating in such a large coordinated release is not to be underestimated, but we believe that the progress we made in setting up our build and release procedures was worth every minute spent.
Now we feel even more involved in the Eclipse community as a whole and are looking forward to the next challenges ahead!
What future enhancements are you planning for your project?
We plan to complement the Swordfish nucleus with other things such as a registry/repository, more advanced monitoring capabilities, deployment etc. to eventually result in a full-fledged open source SOA suite.
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