Sun Microsystems Java Business Integration Technology

Sonic Software, a leading provider of the enterprise service bus (ESB)—and a founding member of the Java Business Integration (JBI) expert group. The ESB is a new communication and integration infrastructure that supports the enterprise requirements of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Sonic's technology delivers the scalability, security, continuous availability and management necessary to connect, mediate and control services in mission-critical business processes across the extended enterprise. Over 1,000 customers use Sonic products to achieve broad-scale interoperability of IT systems and the flexibility to adapt these systems to ever-changing business needs. Sonic is an independent operating company of Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS), a US$360+ million global software industry leader.

JBI will standardize key elements of the ESB service container, and will help create a standardized architecture for Java-based ESBs. This will help solidify the definition of ESB products, much like the way that Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) drove the standard definition of an application server in the late '90s, further accelerating the market adoption of ESBs. JBI will also help foster and accelerate an ecosystem of third-party vendors and will offer interoperable, best of breed integration components that can plug together through an ESB using the JBI interfaces.

Automating business functionality based on an SOA involves additional processing, or mediation logic that helps facilitate the integration itself, such as data transformation and content-based routing. In an SOA-based integration, this mediation logic can be made available as shared services in an SOA processing pipeline. In a JBI environment, a data transformation engine or a rules engine that performs routing of messages based on message content, can each be packaged up within a JBI container and immediately exposed as a reusable integration service in an enterprise SOA through an ESB.