The Eclipse Foundation has announced the first release of Swordfish, a next-generation enterprise service bus (ESB) that provides the flexibility and extensibility required by enterprises to successfully deploy a service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy. Swordfish is based on the OSGi standard and builds upon successful open source projects, including Eclipse Equinox and Apache ServiceMix.

Swordfish is grounded in real-world SOA deployment experience and knowledge. It provides the features and extensible framework required by enterprises and system integrators to customize their ESB to meet the specific needs of an enterprise. These features include:

• Support for distributed deployment, which results in more scalable and reliable application deployments by removing a central coordinating server.
• A runtime Service Registry allows services to be loosely coupled, making it easier to change and update different parts of a deployed application. The Registry uses policies to match service consumers and service providers based on their capabilities and requirements.
• An extensible Monitoring Framework manages events that allow for detailed tracking of how messages are processed. These events can be stored for trend analysis and reporting, or integrated into a complex event processing system (CEP).
• A Remote Configuration Agent makes it possible to configure a large number of distributed servers from a central configuration repository without the need to touch individual installed instances.