Observatory Service Broker (OSB) Contributed to CECID

The University of Hong Kong Center for E-Commerce Infrastructure
Development (CECID) announced that the Observatory Service Broker
(OSB) has been contributed to the open-source community website. The
Observatory Service Broker (OSB) is one of the project deliverable of
Project Plumber. The OSB is an enhanced version of a process-driven
enterprise service bus, which supports a choreography-based business
process. It is based on a published Java standard JSR 208: Java
Business Integration (JBI). JBI is a Java-based standard addressing the
EAI and B2B issues based on the paradigms and principles advocated by
SOA. It defines the standards for composite plug-ins in SOA architecture,
as well as how the plug-ins can communicate with each other. Along with
the OSB, there is a Business Process State Tracking (BPST) engine
registering the rule sets to guide the execution of business processes
and keep track the state of each rule set. The business integration
SPIs enable the creation of a Java business integration environment
for specifications such as WSCI, BPEL4WS, and the W3C Choreography
Working Group. OSB, BPST, and their source code have been released to
CECID open-source community website under GNU General Public License
Version 2. Later on, useful information and articles ranging from
technical issue to general usage of OSB will be available at the
community website. Commenced on March 2006, the Project Plumber aims
to research and develop a software platform to facilitate enterprises
to design and implement service oriented applications to transact with
business partners based on key business-to-business (B2B) standards.
The objectives of this project are to extend Service-Oriented
Architecture (SOA) to support processing of electronic transactions
between enterprises, to develop Web Service components to support
reliable and secure B2B applications based on open standards like
Universal Business Language (UBL), and to develop service modeling
methodology and software to facilitate design of electronic transaction
services.