Red Hat Releases JBoss ESB 4.2

The JBoss Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a subproject of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS). The JBoss ESB component provides a kind of nexus for enterprise applications and services, and thus helps to automate business process workflows. JBoss ESB 4.2 supports various messaging products, the integration of data from Hibernate and MetaMatrix-based data sources, and component models as endpoints for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The software can be scripted using the Java-based Groovy scripting language.

According to the developers, version 4.2 has improved software distribution and configuration thanks to a special ESB server. In April 2007, Red Hat forked JBoss development into an enterprise and a community driven branch.

Commercial enterprise products include support and maintenance contracts, and are more conservative with respect to their development, whereas the community version tends to push technical development along at a faster pace. The current enterprise products are the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform. JBoss ESB is not a standard module with either of these platforms right now. Source code and binary versions of the community software are available from JBoss Labs under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).