Iona ended up with two offerings because it wanted to take advantage of demand for lighter weight ESBs that didn’t need all the connectivity to legacy environments, and it didn't want to miss the open source wave, where it felt it could open a viable subscription business.

Now it’s releasing new versions of both offerings, and says it will start making the piece parts more interchangeable. It dubs it its “hybrid approach to integration.” For now, Iona’s just announcing its intention to enable Artix and FUSE customers mix and match features, such as Artix taking advantage of the JMS engine form FUSE. The best example is that Artix adds support for the Apache Camel enterprise integration patterns (which were originally described in the Enterprise Integration Patterns from the book by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Wolf.

For now there are incremental updates. The open source FUSE offering has some usability enhancements, including getting started and deployment guides and coding patterns, and for those paying for subscriptions, a new web-based management console. Artix adds new provisioning capabilities for services and objects that are managed by its registry/repository. In the spirit of ecumenicalism, the Artix registry/repository adds the capability to govern FUSE and Apache CXF services as Artix orchestration processes.

Given that Artix and FUSE are based on diametrically opposite architectures, enabling a hybrid approach could pose something of a technical challenge. Fortunately, as Iona learned the hard way with its old CORBA products, it needed to decouple its functional capabilities from the he underlying architecture. In essence, it had to adopt the loose coupling that is a cornerstone of service-oriented architectures. It did so with its so-called microkernel architecture back in 1999, which is the reason that the capabilities of its legacy CORBA product Orbix can live on in Artix, and why there could be a way to loosely couple them with FUSE.

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