Open Source Blog

…For those wondering what Apache CXF is, you may recall that it came about through the merger of Iona’s Celtix open source enterprise service bus (ESB), formerly hosted at the ObjectWeb community, and XFire from Codehaus. It became CXF upon the merger and the movement of the project to the Apache Software Foundation in August 2006.

Iona says Apache CXF is one of the top ten Java software projects, with over 60,000 downloads since July 2007. It’s claimed to be one of the easiest (open source) environments for the creation of web services.

"The graduation of CXF to full project status is evidence of the ubiquity of CXF and the diverse and growing community that has contributed to its success," said Larry Alston, VP and general manager of open source at Iona. "A robust and innovative solution developed by a thriving community base, coupled with enterprise support and services represents a compelling Open Source deployment option for enterprise customers."

Of course Iona isn’t a not-for-profit organisation – it’s a commercial software firm. Little surprise then that its ‘FUSE Services Framework’ is an enterprise release of Apache CXF which, “Provides a fully tested and supported Open Source services framework for enterprise deployment.”

For those less familiar with Iona itself, it was founded in 1991, around work done at Trinity College by Chris Horn, Annrai O'Toole and Sean Baker. It launched its Orbix Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) product in 1993, opened US headquarters in Boston in 1995, and went public on Nasdaq in 1997 in one of the most successful software IPOs ever.

Since then it’s had mixed fortunes and ‘lumpy’ financial results, but has tried to adapt to the latest demands with its Artix enterprise services bus (ESB) and various open source initiatives including CXF and FUSE. In its latest quarter it grew sales 6% to $16.4m, but posted a net loss of $5.1m, including a restructuring charge of $1.5m.

The board is apparently currently evaluating what it described in its 10Q as “strategic alternatives” for the firm, no doubt thanks to ongoing concerns that its more modern technologies (Artix, FUSE etc) are not doing quite enough to make up for the gradual decline in its mature Orbix business (down 5% year over year in its latest quarter, to be precise).

One side-story in the Iona tale is that of its irrepressible co-founder Annrai O’Toole. He left Iona to become CEO of ESB firm Cape Clear, which was recently acquired by on-demand business software firm Workday. Workday is turning the Cape Clear ESB into an Integration On-Demand offering.