Laurent Lachal
JBoss acquires Arjuna technologies
On Monday, JBoss announced the acquisition of technologies owned by Arjuna Technologies and HP. These include the Arjuna Transaction Service Suite (ArjunaTS) distributed transaction monitor and Arjuna's Web Services Transaction implementation, which support both Web Services Transaction (WS-TX) and Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) specifications. It will open source these technologies and integrate them with the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS) as its ESB component. Mark Little, Arjuna's chief architect and one of the original creators of ArjunaTS, joins JBoss as director of standards. Arjuna will continue to support existing ArjunaTS customers and continues to sell the Arjuna Message Service (ArjunaMS) product. Comment: This is a smart move for JBoss that increases the pressure on its major target, BEA, and positions it more strongly against IBM. ArjunaTS 4.0 supports transactions that span multiple web services, J2EE and CORBA components. It is not only a reliable product, but also an open one that can handle both short-lived ACID transactions (WS-AtomicTransaction) and long-running business processes (WSBusinessActivity). Thanks to Arjuna's involvement in both web service transaction specifications (while the WS-TX and WS-CAF supporters prefer to argue with one another rather than cooperate), JBoss gains a strong neutral position. It supports whichever specification will eventually survive. Arjuna and JBoss first partnered in March 2003 and have already integrated their offerings. Arjuna released Arjuna+JBoss 1.1 that integrates ArjunaTS, ArjunaMS and the JBoss application server in July 2004. As a result, the acquisition should be quite painless. It also means closer ties between webMethods and JBoss. WebMethods, which has supported the JBoss application server since early 2003, also OEMed ArjunaTS in early 2005. It is unclear though why JBoss defines the technology as an ESB technology. ArjunaTS is much more of a challenge to BEA Tuxedo than BEA AquaLogic ESB (which competes with ArjunaMS).
