JBI

IBM and BEA doesn’t vote “yes” for the JBI approval:

JSR-208, Java Business Integration (or JBI), has passed the final ballot, with two abstentions from BEA and IBM. JBI is a specification that addresses standardization integration of services, with a preview available hosted on http://java.sun.com/.

All members of the executive committee voted "Yes," with the exceptions of BEA and IBM. BEA's comment on the abstention was:

BEA believes that the JBI specification is an incomplete attempt to standardize the interfaces between multi-vendor infrastructure and contributes little to the usefulness of the Java platform for business application integration, one of the real pain point for our customers. It's unfortunate that it's name alone will result in significant confusion in the marketplace.

IBM also believed the spec was "not a sufficient step forward."

However, companies such as TIBCO are banking on JSR-208 for the integration of service-oriented architectures for their "Hermes" project (due in 2006), for example. This product was described as follows: "Hermes reduces the cost and complexity of implementing and administering an enterprise-class SOA by giving developers a consistent but extensible way of deploying and managing home-grown and third-party services both independently and as part of composite applications."

This capability seemed directly tied to the use of JSR-208, which implies that JBI is a workable definition of a standardized SOA for Java.