White Paper XmlBlaster

Message-oriented Middleware (MOM)

Introduction

Lets introduce our motivation for this open source project with two examples.

Suppose you want to write a software to control all railway ticket machines in your country. Thousands of ticket machines are located on the railway stations across the whole country. How do you want to send new ticket prices, new time tables to the ticket machines, update and maintain the software and handle errors and failures? What if the ticket machines are from 3 different manufacturers and varying models? All the models programmed with different software languages (legacy code), from different software teams. XmlBlaster could be the middleware to glue together this horror scenario.

Suppose again, you are on holiday in one of the beautiful islands and are buying some nice, new shoes, and need cash money with your credit card. The cash request is transferred to the data processing center of the holiday resort bank, from there over some other gateways finally to your house bank. This involves different banking software to communicate secure and reliable with each other, before you receive your money. Such a task may involve software written in different programing languages on different hardware platforms (mainframe, workstations, embedded devices, etc.). An intelligent message oriented middleware like xmlBlaster could perform this task, in an uniform, open way at a fraction of costs.

The examples can be extended to control car manufacturing lines, controlling workstation farms, air traffic control systems etc. As you can see, middleware is already every where, and will play an important role in the future.

Context

Middleware products and markets are evolving rapidly as customers build distributed business applications. These increasingly rely upon the independent system software and services provided by middleware to share computing resources across heterogeneous technologies. Integrated enterprise applications are not replacing the wealth of various applications in organizations. They need to coexist and integrate with a variety of best of breed and legacy applications, and middleware - or rather business ware - is needed to do the necessary application integration among various vendors' software [IDC].

Client/server MOM computing is the ultimate open platform. This gives you the freedom to mix-and-match components at almost any level. It allows you to put together an incredible variety of networked client and server combinations across the entire spectrum of the computer industry. Intergalactic client/server will allow enterprises (B2B) to thrive in a quickly changing business climate - where they are driven by demands that must be fulfilled in "Internet years". According to IDC, the middleware market will grow to approximately $7 billion in year 2002 - a 408% increase since 1997 (Source: IDC, Middleware: 1998 Worldwide Markets and Trends, May, 1998) [Orfali].

Current market situation

The MOM market is ruled by a few big companies. Many of these products are somehow outdated, compared to technologies used today. The pricing of these middleware products is at the high end of the usual software pricing scale.

Goals

Technology

XmlBlaster MOM will be based on following modern technologies and standards to fulfill the goals.

Benefit

These new technologies, concentrated in a generic software MOM product, may be used as a base for industrial and intranet/internet projects. Having this technology at the finger tips, gives a major technological head start, opening a huge new market.

Realization

The realization will be done in an open source team, in a concentrated development effort. The license of xmlBlaster is an Open Source license (LGPL, http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lgpl.html), free for educational, private or commercial use, to allow widespread use, accepted interfaces and a maximum of code stability.