Red Hat JBoss SOA Platform 5.1 Goes After Enterprise Data Services

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Red Hat is expanding its JBoss portfolio this week with the release of JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform 5.1. As part of the release, JBoss is updating its Enterprise SOA platform as well as the JBoss Developer Studio.

The Enterprise Data Services Platform 5.1 release is a new addition to the JBoss SOA platform suite, building on technologies that Red Hat acquired in 2007 from MetaMatrix.

“The data services extensions includes the full use of the SOA platform and adds the notion of data integration and data virtualization,” Pierre Fricke, the director of SOA product line management at Red Hat told InternetNews.com.

Fricke explained that enterprise data services helps to solve the problems associated with having multiple data sets in different formats spread across an enterprise, that might overlap. He added that business processes and managers want a more holistic view of data instead of getting everything in pieces.

“The data services platforms gives enterprises the tools to create that holistic view much more effectively,” Fricke said. “It provides the tools to integrate that into other part of an IT infrastructure, applications and processes as well as providing governance for who gets to access the data.”

Fricke noted that the core MetaMatrix platform on which the enterprise data services platform is based was open sourced in 2009. Red Hat has been expanding the platform, with integration with the rest of the JBoss portfolio and hardening it for enterprise usage.

There are two main open source projects that flow into the enterprise data services platform. The Teeid project is the data virtualization engine which provides the data access capabilities. There is also a repository project called Modeshape, that provide the foundation for governing and understanding the data services artifacts.

The Enterprise Data Services Platform 5.1 release also includes JBoss Developer Studio 4.0 (JBDS). JBDS is an Eclipse based IDE that Red Hat first released in 2007 after acquiring the technology from software vendor Exadel. The JBDS 3.0 release debuted in March of 2010 as part of the JBoss SOA Platform 5.0 release.

Fricke noted that the new JBDS 4.0 provides new testing tools for web services and provides integrations with the data services and SOA platform.

From a technology preview perspective, Enterprise Data Services Platform 5.1, includes an Apache Camel Gateway.

“Apache Camel is a popular integration framework pattern that provides the foundation for doing integrations of different types,” Fricke said. “You can think of Apache Camel as being a developer framework and then as ESB (enterprise service bus) as being the enterprise runtime that supports it.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.