EAI company SeeBeyond has announced Integrated Composite Application Networks Suite (ICAN) 5.0, J2EE integration environment that includes its own J2EE 1.3 appserver but also runs on BEA/IBM. SeeBeyond's suite includes over 80 pre-built J2EE connector adaptors, a workflow/orchestration product, an IDE for programming-free JSP design/generation, management tools, guaranteed JMS messaging, and more.

The suites new workflow, portal, and business activity-monitoring capabilities sound similar to stuff coming out of IBM, BEA and Oracle. It's interesting that an ndependent (non-vendor) is providing a platform like this.

Read SeeBeyond builds EAI platform and the press relase.

All the components will be rolled out over the next four months, with the J2EE platform shipping at the end of this month. Pricing for the individual components, which will be based on CPUs, hasn't been set.

"Ian Howells, vice president of marketing at SeeBeyond, told vnunet.com: "You can give your whole stack top to bottom to BEA [WebLogic], IBM [WebSphere], Microsoft or SAP, but nobody is happy doing that."


I can't see why customers would opt to buy into a complex and heavy-weight EAI suite rather than leverage their existing J2EE infrastructure. With standards such as BPEL4WS and WS-Transaction, customers have the choice of light-weight orchestration servers that do not require specialized skills and are much cheaper and easy to manage and monitor.

Cheers.

Jill.

While it's great to see these legacy EAI vendors moving into Java and J2EE they still seem to think all EAI problems need megalithic solutions. SeeBeyond now join Sybase, IBM, Mercator et al in an already commoditised J2EE integration market.

There’ll be yet more salesmen trying to convince us that 30 years of integration will all of a sudden be fixed by using web services. What happened to performance, simplicity and solutions that fit the problem? Instead we have solutions so complex that the original problem is dwarfed in comparison. The price is so high the customers feel obliged to use it for everything to justify the cost; no one dare admit that they perhaps over did it.

C24 (independently formed out of the financial arm of Mercator in 2000) have come up with a unique solution. Unique in the EAI field but probably quite familiar to the readers of TheServerSide. A code generator, just like Castor, JAXB etc. C24’s Integration Objects (IO) uses metadata libraries to generate your integration code. The data model, presentation and transport layers can be defined using a Swing based design tool, simply clicking on "deploy" generates all the code you need to solve the problem. There is no license fee for the generated code; it can be deployed world-wide without added cost.

IO supports most financial standards, SWIFT 15022, FixML, FpML, GSTPA, FIX, Murex and many others. It can import metadata from database schemas, XML schemas and DTDs and easily handles JMS, flat files, databases, FTP, sockets and other transports.

Scalability? Most clients are using pure Java applications however IO can be deployed as EJBs, Servlets or even into JavaSpaces. The latter has seen SWIFT transformations toping 1000 per second on a single box, albeit a powerful one from Sun!

Check out the free SWIFT MT100/MT103 transformation, it's been open-sourced and will easily transform over 100/sec on a decent laptop. Unbeatable performance, price, simplicity, scalability, flexibility and openness.

-John Davies-
(I must admit to being slightly biased being a director of C24. We do have plenty of happy customers who would also sing its praise, sadly they just don’t read TheServerSide.)

am I reading correctly that you are advertising your product on a competitors thread? I think a minimum of etiquette should be kept. I for my part dont appreciate this.

regards.

Christian,
    You are half way there, advertising our product yes, on a competitor's thread, no not at all. The people who run this thread are far from competitors, SeeBeyond are definately competitors but I don't think they "own" this thread.

This is a technical forum is it not, being a technically oriented person I thought I'd point out the errors of their ways (IMOHO). The first post on the thread was no less of an advert than mine. If you care to take a look at the most popular threads on TheServerSide you'll see that most of them are based on two vendors arguing their differing points of view on architecture, I'm just following on in the same way.

Let's get get back to the technical talk and I'll stop advertising.

-John-

You guys should be required to wrap your ads with <shamless-plug> tags...

SeeBeyond's eGate product had a pretty robust (and elegant, IMO) messaging integration platform. Probably the most cost-effective solution out there, and it didn't brutalize the network for doing pub/sub. It'll be interesting to see how intact it made the port to JMS.

But, they'd have been far better off partnering or OEMing a WebLogic, WebSphere, or a JBoss, than building their own J2EE appserver. A total waste of good R&D talent. These guys should stick with what they have done well in the past:
1) Connectors (as in pre-packaged JCA)
2) Process integration (as in a J2EE-compatible one)
3) Transformation tools (as in that can generate _Java_ source)
4) Messaging (as in JMS implementation)

My $0.02
Mike

Yup you're right, I'm shamless. :-)

I have a lot of respect for SeeBeyond's eGate it's definately one of the best "classic" EAI products around. I'm just not impressed with their entry into the J2EE world, it looks very much like another case of "We can do it better so will write our own" and we end up with another wheel, albeit a "J2EE standard" wheel.

I have to agree with Mike, it looks like a waste of good developer time, but as competition I can only smile and encourage them.

By the way, did I tell you we've just added full XPath support for all data models, not just XML but even flat files, databases, SWIFT and other formats. Oops there I go again shame on me!

-John-

Sounds like a lot of marketing noise to me. These medium-tier players have to be seen to be doing what the big boys do regardless of originality or technical merit. In these lean times it is also important to keep the volume of noise up so that you look busier than you really are. It'll be obvious whether there's anything other than hot air behind it once (if) anyone has practical experience of implementation. Also not sure I understand / agree with Floyd when he uses the term "independent (non-vendor)" in relation to SeeBeyond - surely a vendor is exactly what they are, or did I miss the point.

Regards

Steve

Hey Steve, I should have been clearer. I meant that SeeBeyond is not an appserver vendor.

Floyd