A new ESB and messaging platform join Red Hat's middleware

Red Hat has announced the addition of two new products to its middleware portfolio. The company acquired JBoss Fuse and JBoss A-MQ with the takeover of Progress subsidiary FuseSource last year. The first product is an open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that builds on the Apache Camel Enterprise Integration framework; Red Hat notes that it now employs 25 contributors to that Apache project.

It is intended as a "lightweight" alternative to Red Hat's own ESB, which appears to have a different target group. Red Hat's ESB runs on a full application server and provides features such as registry-repository, service deployment, and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) support. JBoss Fuse, on the other hand, uses the Apache Karaf OSGi implementation; however, it does seem possible to use the two ESBs in combination.

JBoss A-MQ used to be known as Fuse Message Broker. The technology is mainly based on Apache ActiveMQ, a messaging platform that implements the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). Sooner or later, Red Hat's previous JBoss MRG AMQ implementation is due to disappear and will be superseded by JBoss A-MQ.

Support for both JBoss Fuse and JBoss A-MQ has now been integrated into Red Hat's JBoss Operational Network administrative software. JBoss Developer Studio, a development environment that integrates into Eclipse, has been adapted for use with the new Red Hat components. Also available for the new products are the Fuse IDE and Fuse Fabric, an admin console for distributed application containers.

Beta versions of both products can now be downloaded. Red Hat has promised that production-ready versions of JBoss Fuse and JBoss A-MQ will become generally available next month.

(djwm)