A month ago, it was announced that Talend had acquired Sopera. At the time, many people wondered what that really meant as Talend specialized in Data Integration and Mangement technologies and Sopera was more of an Application Integration company. Over the last couple months, I’ve defintely been involved in a lot of meetings and con calls and such to start flushing out ideas and roadmaps and such.
The first step in plan occured today with the release of Talend Service Factory. TSF is primarily a repackaged distribution of Apache CXF that is optimized more for Enterprise level use. There are two major changes from the Apache distributions:
- Java 6 optimized – Talend is only committing to supporting Java 6 so the lib directory has been optimized for Java 6, removing a bunch of things that are already provided by the JDK.
- OSGi container – a “container” directory is added which is a full OSGi container, including Equinox and Karaf, preconfigured with everything needed to use CXF in OSGi.
I’m actually quite excited about the second item for a few reasons. For one, it actually made me start looking at and using OSGi. I guess I’m a little behind the curve on that. Second, it fills a void between the lightweight services and samples that Apache CXF provides and supports and a full, heavyweight ESB like ServiceMix. We’ve had quite a few people ask about OSGi containers and such on the CXF lists. I’ve always felt a bit guilty about pointing them at something as huge and complex as ServiceMix when they don’t need it or want it. You can download the release here.
The OTHER thing that we worked hard on is a new set of documented examples that show off some of the more advanced features of CXF, ALL of them designed to be run standalone (like all the Apache CXF samples) or in the OSGi container. We all learned a lot writing the examples. We had to fix some bugs in CXF to get some of them to work in the OSGi container, but that’s part of the process. I think Sergey, Glen, and I may talk more about these examples in the upcoming days. Until then, feel free to download them and give them a run through. We have more in the works as well.
The important thing to remember is that this is just a start. Step 1. We have a lot of stuff in progress for 2011 that I’m quite excited about.