Apache Synapse Bumped to Top Project Status

• By Kurt Mackie
• 02/06/08

The Apache Software Foundation Tuesday ratcheted up the project status of its open source Apache Synapse enterprise service bus (ESB) technology. The Foundation established Apache Synapse as a Top-Level Project, boosting it from subproject status under Apache Web Services.

In addition, version 1.1.1 of Apache Synapse has been released under Apache 2.0 software licensing.

The higher profile for Apache Synapse marks its ability to go beyond "just integrating Web services," according to Paul Fremantle, chair of the Apache Synapse project management committee and vice president of technical sales at WSO2 Inc.

"The advancement of Apache Synapse to a Top-Level Project reflects a wider maturity of the project, growing developer interest, and a different appeal and approach to the other open source ESBs in the marketplace," Fremantle stated in an announcement issued by the Foundation.

Apache Synapse is an enterprise-grade open source ESB for message routing in service-oriented architecture-type deployments. It supports multiple open standards, including "HTTP, SOAP, FTP, SMTP, XML, XSLT, XPath, JMS, Web Services Security (WSS), Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-RM)," and others, according to the announcement.

The ESB can be used to connect "multiple back-end systems including record-based files, DB2 mainframe-based systems, and IBM MQ Series," Fremantle stated.

It's currently being used in a commercial deployment by New Zealand-based system integrator Black Coffee Software, according to the announcement.

Additional information about Apache Synapse v1.1.1, which is currently available for download, can be found here.