General FAQ
Table of Contents
Cetlix is an open source Java Web services ESB implementation. It is based on JAX-WS 2.0.
ESB stands for Enterprise Service Bus. An ESB is the layer of technology that makes SOA possible. It enables the abstraction by translating the messages defining the services into data that can be manipulated by a physical process implementing a service. Essentially, an ESB is the yarn that weaves a SOA together.
SOA stands for Service-Oriented Architecture. Service-Oriented Architecture is an approach to software architecture with the goal to decouple the agents of work in a software system from the functionality advertised by those agents. An agent offers a contract, representing a service, which can then be consumed by other software agents that require work to be done. In SOA terms, the contract-offering agent is the Service Provider, and the contract itself represents the Service. Using SOA, system designers can describe the core functions of the system as service elements that can be composed and reused to form business applications.
Celtix is the only ESB that implements the JAX-WS specification. Also, Celtix has the ability to send SOAP messages over HTTP built-in, and it does not require any external program for this functionality, like Apache Axis. Also, Celtix is not based on a particular messaging technology. It supports JMS and comes with ActiveMQ, but it can work with any JMS implementation. Celtix is extensible, so it is possible to write other messaging transports for Celtix since the messaging bus is not tightly bound to how Celtix works.
Due to the rapid innovation capability of an open source community, Celtix is comparable, and ahead in some ways, in capability to commercial Java-centric ESBs. For example, Celtix is currently the only ESB with JAX-WS support. The non-Java-centric ESBs complement and interoperate with Celtix to provide additional transports and bindings, i.e. IONA's Artix product provides additional capabilities to integrate with IBM MQ, CORBA, Tuxedo, etc.
Yes. Celtix is built and packaged using Maven 2.0 from Apache. All of the documentation for the Celtix project is written using OpenOffice 2.0.
Celtix also uses components from Spring and Active MQ.
The Celtix team is also working with the STP project at the Eclipse foundation to build a set of GUI tools for developing SOAs.
Currently a number of open source projects are in discussions with the Celtix project about taking shared dependencies.
Yes.
Yes.