ObjectWebCon05

This Monday Orbeon gave a short talk on XML pipelines at ObjectWebCon05 in Lyon, France. The talk was done in the context of ObjectWeb's ESBi initiative. The goal of this initiative is, in ObjectWeb's own words, "to foster reuse of ObjectWeb middleware in the domain of Enterprise Application Integration, starting with a special focus on Enterprise Service Buses".

But first a few words on ObjectWeb, "an international consortium fostering the development of open-source middleware". Thanks in part to the quality of the projects under its umbrella, and the support of companies like RedHat, ObjectWeb has seen tremendous growth over the last year. Check out in particular such projects as JOnAS, a full-fledged J2EE application server, JORAM, an implementation of JMS, and C-JDBC, a transparent clustered JDBC solution.

This year's version of ObjectWebCon was the most ambitious to date, and like any major conference featured keynotes, including one by Brian Behlendorf, companies' booths, and several talks in parallel. It was a pleasure to meet there with a bunch of very interesting people from different horizons, and to get a feel for the French way of doing business.

Now back to the talk itself. The main idea was to present two components that can gravitate around an Enterprise Service Bus: the Presentation Server, and the XML Server. From there, a few very simple scenarios, XML data capture and presentation (Presentation Server), and XML data transformation (XML Server), were discussed, and quickly led to discussing how XML pipelines, in particular XPL, are a cool solution to address those scenarios. The slides should be soon available from ObjectWeb.