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MOM and SOA on Linux?
dogmeant asks: "I have yet to see MOM (message oriented middleware) offerings on Linux much less open source projects that address the same. And while we're at it, what about tools that address SOA/BPM (Service oriented architecture/business process modeling) type architectures on Linux? Is the Open Source community ready to take on challenges like this?" If anyone else out there has this particular itch, maybe this will be another niche in which Open Source software can catch some Enterprise mindshare.
Bingo!
Stumbling in the dark
I hear slavering of jaws
Eaten by a grue.
Middleware is an interesting area. The trouble is, is that it doesn't offer enough for someone to bother coding it.
It works well for companies because:
1) They can afford to put time and investment into 'the latest fad', whereas in the OS community the time is better spent elsewhere. (The point isn't phrased very well sorry - read on)
2) It is good for companies to produce middleware because they can offer a high level of intergration between their products - hence locking you into their whole range. E.g. Lotus domino - news server,web server, database all in one. In the OS community you would chose the best database applicable, the best web server applicable, and quickly write some scripts to communicate between them.
3) Middleware solves problems that people don't know they have - so don't notice that itch to solve them. However in business, companies produce such software, then tell other companies they have the problem, and solve it. (I'm not very good at getting point across today - sorry.) For example: IBM do a message passing program that basically consolidates errors between servers. Say a hub breaks down, and suddenly a load of machines report they can't access the machines behind the hub. What you want is for the computers to talk to a central node, and the central node to reduce all the errors down to a "x,y,z machines can't be reached, they are all behind router r, hence I suspect r is down." Then when the machine come back, delete the errors.
First link returned by Google on 'mom linux' is http://sourceforge.net/projects/isectd. Says there it's stable/production dev status.
The IBM middleware family, formerly known as MQSeries, now called IBM WebSphere MQ family, has ports for Linux. More info on the IBM site
Vinci is a SOA for Linux. The site describes it as "a local area service-oriented architecture designed for rapid development and management of robust web applications"
I have attended presentations on MQ series, and found it interesting, but never had any opportunity to use it. I found the Vinci paper by googling.
Jabber is normally thought of as yet another IM system, but "Jabber is an open XML protocol for the real-time exchange of messages and presence between any two points on the Internet" (from the Jabber site). Its first application has been IM, but it is by no means limited to IM. Jabber is a protocol specification, and there are several open and closed source implementations of clients and servers.
xmlBlaster is a more traditional MOM offering, under LGPL. It supports numerous protocols and bindings into a number of languages.
As usual, Google offers a lot of advice on the topic of 'mom middleware "open source"', including a list of MOM implementations which tells us that JORAM is also open source, and an article entitle Open Source in Middleware.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
My mother wants to use powerpoint and play the latest games on Linux. Can anybody help her?
The project is spear-headed by INRIA (a French research institute). The whole system is open-source and they are doing quite advanced stuff (including group communications).
This is a common situation in open source and I don't see it changing anytime soon. The fact is that apps such as middleware are business apps. They aren't terribly sexy or cool. They are however, important to business and are usually specific to a particular business.
On the other hand, it seems that most open source developers are motivated to scratch their own itch. They are drawn to apps that are cool and apps that meet their needs. This is perfectly understandable but, it does result in a derth of open source business apps that are either mundane or just plain boaring. For this reason, open source offers an emormous assortment of "toy" apps. There are countless cd burners/rippers, MP3/Ogg players/encoders, Linux utilities and so forth. There are also a ridiculous amount of frameworks and libraries, usually all repeating the same theme. If I see another "yet another framework" project I'm going to be sick.
There are only a few business type open source projects and even fewer ones that could be considered mature enough and good enough to run your business on them. If a business wants a particular app they must build it themselves. This of course costs money and in some cases it costs a huge amount of money. And there in lies the problem. Most businesses that have spent large amounts of money on development are not interested or willing to give it away by making their project open source. For these two reasons there are very few business type open source apps like middleware and it will be a long time before there are, if ever.
no ...we're not talking alphabet soup. Mind you, in today's TLA craze, you just never know. I just read a max'd out thread on MOM offerigns for Linux and offer this.
While I'm a big fan of open-sourced solutions, there are plenty of commercial MOM offerings out there that run on Linux. A really solid one that I've worked with is SonicMQ. It runs on Linux and many other platforms. Being built 100% in Java makes that possible.
As for SOAs, there's another offering from Sonic called SonicXQ that offers a standards-based SOA that includes support for web services, content-based routing, transformation, and itinerary-based process flow, all done using proven standards. They recently added a suite of XML tools from the acquisition of eXcelon that gives them sophisticated XML storage and handling as well as stateful conversational BPM.
The industry has labeled this new form of SOA that combines MOM, Web services, cbr and transformation as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Lots of talk about the ESB being a more flexible cost-effective integration strategy than the traditional integration brokers approach.
And this too runs on Linux.
As has been said, IBM MQSeries / Websphere MQ is available for Linux. So is the granddaddy of all Message Oriented Middleware, BEA MessageQ, formerly known as DECMessageQ. So is BEA Tuxedo. So is Tibco Enterprise. I'm sure there are others but considering that the above four cover something like 99% of the MOM market, whether on Linux or not, it's pretty silly to say there are no MOM products available for Linux.