SDTimes

BY DAVID WORTHINGTON Continuing its shopping spree, Progress Software has bought another SOA specialist. The company has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Iona Technologies, a developer of SOA infrastructure software that would round out Progress’ product portfolio. The move follows Progress’ acquisition last month of Mindreef. Under the most recent deal, Progress would pay Iona shareholders US$4. 05 per share, in a transaction valued at $162 million. The Iona board unanimously approved the deal, which now awaits the OK from government regulators and Iona shareholders. The deal is expected to be completed in September, at which time Iona would become a wholly owned subsidiary of Progress. “Finally, a SOA infrastructure deal that makes good sense on both sides,” said Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink. “Iona gets to be part of an organization that has strong sales and marketing, as well as a deep customer base, and Progress gets some of the better technology on the market at what is arguably a fire sale price. ” The deal follows Progress’ buyout of Mindreef, which is engaged in quality management and testing tools for SOA and may be best known for its SOAPscope (tinyurl. com/4277sc). Iona may be best known for its Artix line, which includes the Artix Connect for WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), Artix Data Services and Artix ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), as well as other lines, including versions of opensource testing products, sold under the Fuse brand. Iona also brings a reasonably solid legacy CORBA clientele with its Orbix customers, Bloomberg noted. The Artix ESB, which is a fork of the open-source Fuse ESB, a derivative of Apache ServiceMix, has a distributed architecture that doesn’t rely on a centralized server. Its use of distributed endpoints allows incremental adoption and dynamic configuration of services. By contrast, Progress’ Sonic ESB takes a more traditional MQ-based approach. The ESB is built on Progress’ Sonic XQ message queue technology. MELDING TWO STYLES “The biggest challenge Progress faces is in explaining the respective benefits of these two arguably continued on page 26 > BY ROBERT MULLINS As it marks its first anniversary, the GNU General Public License v3 has drawn more than 3,000 open-source software projects—and that number could double by its second birthday— according to one company that’s keeping score. Though that figure pales compared with the number of GPL v2 licenses, a spokesperson for the leading advocate of GPL v3 said that its adoption rate spells success. The Free Software Foundation released GPL v3, the latest legal language for governing the use of open-source software, on June 29, 2007, after 18 months of deliberation. It was intended to simplify Byzantine language in GPL v2 and more assertively advance the cause of free—as in able to be freely used—software. But while backers are impressed that GPL v3 projects are growing at the rate of about 20% a month, most GPL v2 licensees are unlikely to quickly migrate to GPL v3. “We have nothing against GPL v3, but we still see most of the market using GPL v2,” said Yves de Montcheuil, vice president of marketing for Talend, a provider of data integration software. “We feel no need to be the first ones to make a move. ” The first moves have already been made. SugarCRM, a maker of free and open-source customer relationship management BY ROBERT MULLINS It may take a Mussolini to make the trains run on time, but the Eclipse Foundation seems to have found its own secret to punctuality. This year’s Eclipse release train, Ganymede, rolled last month, carrying with it a bundle of upgrades to the open-source IDE. The foundation limits those overhauls to an annual update, allowing developers who build Eclipse-based tools to time their product releases appropriately. The Ganymede release—named for the satellite of Jupiter, as were the Callisto and Europa releases before it—contains updates from 23 Eclipse projects that include as many as 18 million lines of new code. For the less poetically inclined, Ganymede also is known as Eclipse 3. 4. One of the most important upgrades is the provisioning system for easier installation and updating of Eclipse, said Ian Skerrett, marketing director of the Eclipse Foundation. Called p2, the system replaces Update Manager. The aim of p2 is to automate the process of deploying revisions to already-in-use software, noted Skerrett. When developers build distributed software and deploy it widely, they want to be able to update easily with new or revised components, he explained. But Update Manager required many manual steps, making the process brittle. “To ensure that the dependencies and prerequisites of one project match up, this new provisioning platform makes that all Progress gets SOA acquisitive All aboard! Eclipse release train enters station Tool developers tie introductions to Ganymede schedule continued on page 23 > JULY 15, 2008 • ISSUE NO. 202 www. sdtimes. com • $9. 95 A BZ Media Publication page 31 SPECIAL REPORT Sun’s unlimited GlassFish-MySQL pairing has limits . . . . 3 WSO2 integrates open-source registry with ESB . . . . . . 6 Salesforce, Google aim toolkit at developers . . . . . . . . . . 9 Microsoft ships Hyper-V early . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Visual Studio tapped as cross-platform IDE . . . . . . . . . . 16 Nokia to buy Symbian and open-source OS code . . . . . . 29 BINSTOCK: BDD coming to a tool near you . . . . . . . . . . 34 O’BRIEN: Shaping a solution to relational problems . . . 36 LINTHICUM: When SOA standards attack . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 IN THIS ISSUE What I learned at Cloud Camp page 4 Bloomberg: Good deal on both sides. GPLVV3:NO TERRIBLE TWOS continued on page 18 >