Hello everybody, here we are at EclipseCon 2009 in lovely Santa Clara. We've got another guest with ourselves, would you like to introduce yourself? Yes, hi, my name is Oliver, I'm working for a company called Sopra, it's based out of Germany. Sopra is a company that produces an SOA, an open source SOA suite, and we're also running the Swordfish project in Eclipse and I'm the project leader. We actually, I forget if I was doing it with you, but at Redmonk we had a video of just talking about Swordfish, about a year ago or so. Yes, I think you met Rico. That's right, it was with Rico, that's right. And at that point, you know, it was sort of an idea that you guys were developing. This week. You guys actually sort of released the 1.0 version of Swordfish. We announced the release. You announced it. It's going to be released at the end of next week. Right. But we announced the release and it's the first re-release, it's 0.8. And I'm very proud of that. It's an achievement, definitely, and had a long way to go through all the IP compliance process in Eclipse. Right, right. It's always difficult, especially when you have an existing code base and need to somehow restructure that and make it basically IP clean so that it can smoothly go through the IP compliance process. It was a huge effort, but we finally managed to do it and now we're proud on our first release. That said, can you tell us what Swordfish is exactly? I mean, for the Eclipse world, it is something slightly different than what I think most people would expect. Definitely, because Eclipse is probably most well-known for everything IDE related. So the whole runtime story is quite new for Eclipse. And Swordfish is definitely something that happens on the runtime side of things. So it doesn't have any fancy IDE plug-ins. It doesn't have a UI. It's a completely runtime oriented kind of framework that you can use to build service oriented applications on top of existing Eclipse technology like Equinox and other things from the Eclipse ecosystem. So it's back-end technology. It's back-end technology. You could also use it on the front end. You could use it for creating RCP applications that interact with back-end web services, for example.
2:00So it's not completely back-end, but it's mostly back-end. The idea of SOA service oriented architectures is a pretty expansive idea. It can mean all sorts of things. And usually what I find is people who have, or technologies that are an SOA, if you will, I mean, they have a particular sort of take on what an SOA is. And I imagine Swordfish is the same sort of thing. The basic philosophy of Swordfish is that the ESB as the central component in any SOA should be actually not that central. It should be decentralized. It should be a distributed ESB. And this is exactly the pattern that Swordfish follows. So it's a distributed ESB, which basically means there are no central components that you definitely need for participants in your SOA to interact. So it's very decentralized. Very decentralized. Okay. It's connected with the actual business implementations of code. Okay. So all the mediation happens directly between participants. I mean, there are some central components like a configuration system, a registry that is used during mediation of service calls. But you don't need that once the connection setup has happened. And so would you say there's a lot of peer-to-peer stuff happening in the Swordfish? Yeah, definitely. Okay. Definitely. After the first connection setup, everything is peer-to-peer. There's no central component that becomes a bottleneck. How did the Swordfish technology come about? The history goes back until, I think it's 1999, so one decade of experience, when Deutsche Post DHL, which is the largest logistics company in the world, started their SOA program. And they found that there was no commercial solution available, so they created their own SOA framework. And in 2007, they decided to publish it as open source software. And basically the mission of SOA is to, well, to support the further development of this platform inside the Eclipse Foundation ecosystem. SOA was founded in 2007. Okay. It was exactly this mission. Right. And so it really is a company built around a single stack.
4:01Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're constantly extending the stack to other things. For example, we are adding BPM. We are adding service activity monitoring. Everything around this platform. But it pretty much revolves around this core component of the SOA. Given that you're sort of, I mean, what I would term a sort of ESB-based SOA, if you will. Which... Whatever ESB means. Yeah, sure. It's different things from different people. It begs the question what an ESB is, but we'll save that for the ESB discussion. What are the kind of things that, whether it was Deutsche Post or other uses that you're seeing or thinking of, like what are people using the Swordfish for? Since Swordfish is actually a framework, it's not a complete ESB, I don't see any limitation regarding its use. So you can use it for pretty lightweight applications or you can use it for heavy enterprise applications. It depends on the kind of plugins that you install inside the framework. Because the framework doesn't mandate any specific implementations. For example, you could do completely without registry and just use local service information to make it service costs. Or you could use an enterprise registry for large enterprise settings. Right. So there's no limitation. Another thing that's often associated with SOAs is the, you know, the WSTAR specs. All the big web services specs. Yeah. And that's another interesting sort of different take on people who, on SOA platforms that you will have is sort of how much, how web servicey they are. And so like how, how does sort of this, the web service standards fit into Swordfish? Right now we're pretty web servicey. I wouldn't say we're confined to web services, but the current implementation and the current components that we deliver as part of Swordfish are completely geared to our web services. But we're going to add things like distributed OSGI later. It's on the roadmap. But the need our customers have right now is web service technology. And this is why we're quite web servicey at the moment. I'm not going to put out the list of service, of standards that we support, but pretty much everything. Right, right. We were talking before we were filming a little bit that you guys had six sessions about
6:01Swordfish here at EclipseCon. And I'm always curious when people announce something, one of the ways I'm always, you know, trying to figure out what the reaction to it is, is by what questions people are asking about it. The question we get asked most is what the differentiating factors are. Because there are many other open source SOA solutions out there. So what differentiates Swordfish and other open source frameworks? And the answer to that is we're building upon existing open source frameworks. And we add features that we're missing in enterprise environments. So we've learned from the experience at Deutsche Post that things like integration of a runtime registry, extensive monitoring, remote configuration are things that large enterprises really need to run, to successfully run the SOA. And this is missing in things like service mix, for example. So we're adding that on top of service mix. It sounds like part of what you're getting at is what I would call sort of the operation side of having an SOA, that it's certainly a big task. But one thing to develop something that would be an SOA or uses SOA techniques. But then when you actually put it into runtime, there's a whole other set of concerns that you have when you give it to the people who are now in charge of making sure it's healthy. And so what are the kinds of things that Swordfish has to offer for that? For example, we provide a facility to monitor what's going in inside your SOA. To collect events and then you can, for example, add components that correlate events, complex event processing engines to correlate events and, for example, calculate KPIs based on those events. So something that large enterprises need. I guess it's been a few years now, but Eclipse has really moved strategically. You know, the Eclipse Foundation and the projects it works on into doing runtimes, if you will, instead of, as we were talking about at the beginning, just being UI focused. And so, obviously, you know, Swordfish is a runtime environment, a backend sort of thing. And how, I mean, how, in respect to, you know, the Eclipse ecosystem and community,
8:02how is Swordfish sort of fitting into that, expanding into the runtime area? First of all, it builds upon existing Eclipse runtime technology, such as Equinox. Equinox is the common basis for all Eclipse runtime technologies, and it definitely builds upon Equinox. But we also see that there are a lot of other projects in the runtime space that could probably make use of Swordfish. One noted example is Smila, Smila project, which creates something like a semantic search kind of thing. And they definitely have a need to interface to web services. And Swordfish is exactly the kind of framework they could use to do exactly that. Well, that sounds great. Well, thanks for taking all this time to talk about Swordfish with us. Thanks for giving us a chance to talk about it. Absolutely. Thank you. Absolutely.