Deutsche Post spin-off, SOPERA GmbH, has announced an initiative that will change how businesses build and use software applications – especially those suited for cloud computing.

SOPERA's Eclipse SOA initiative provides a comprehensive platform within Eclipse that enables developers to build Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications. The Eclipse SOA platform will include a new service registry/repository, integrate process orchestration engines, and provide integration between Eclipse Swordfish (SOA Runtime Framework) and the SOA Tooling Platform (STP).

"Business applications are increasingly becoming service oriented and this initiative addresses the demand to compose and decompose applications dynamically," said Dr. Ricco Deutscher, managing director at SOPERA. " The key drivers for that trend are the increasing speed of changing business needs, business process outsourcing, and in the long-term -- cloud computing. We are driving the community-building around Eclipse SOA to leverage the new components of Eclipse Runtime."

"SOPERA has enabled us to very quickly build applications on the fly, using proven, tested components – allowing us to do more with less," said Stephan Aevermann, from daenet. "We have significantly increased our business using SOPERA tools." As an international software business based in Frankfurt, Germany, daenet (www.daenet.eu ) has been advising its clients on software technologies since 1998 -- and implementing customer projects in a timely and efficient manner.

"In today's economic climate, there is definite opportunity for open source SOA," said Dana Gardner, principal analyst, Interarbor Solutions. "Plus, we see emerging requirements for modern middleware that includes SOA and helps prepare for cloud-based applications."

Eclipse Swordfish
SOPERA also joined with the Eclipse Foundation to announce the upcoming first release of Swordfish, a next-generation enterprise service bus (ESB) that provides the flexibility and extensibility required by enterprises to successfully deploy an SOA strategy. Swordfish is based on the OSGi standard and builds upon successful open source technologies, including Eclipse Equinox and Apache ServiceMix.

Swordfish is based on the experience and knowledge from real-world SOA deployments at Deutsche Post -- providing the features and extensible framework required by enterprises and system integrators to customize their ESB to meet the specific needs of an enterprise.

About Eclipse SOA
Eclipse SOA provides an integrated platform for service-oriented application development in Eclipse -- enabling business application developers to use Eclipse for more than just writing client or rich client applications. Eclipse SOA can be the foundation for the next step –building powerful service-oriented applications with one of the most widely-used integrated development environments.

Cloud SOA
Last month, SOPERA joined forces with Microsoft and Open-Xchange under the umbrella of the Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF) (www.osbf.de), the non-profit European open source business network, to announce a platform that for the first time leverages service-oriented architecture (SOA) for cloud computing.

The Internet Service Bus (ISB) makes applications accessible as a service regardless of whether they are on premise or on the Internet -- enabling developers to easily access and use existing, proven code to build composite applications. At the same time, the ISB creates a bridge between Java and .NET software applications and ensures seamless interoperability. The ISB, which is based on the SOPERA open source platform, was demonstrated during CeBit 2009 in Hanover, Germany as a prototype integrating the applications Open-Xchange, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Virtual Earth to form one integrated solution.