Several open source components comprise the Celtix ESB platform. These include:

* Celtix Advanced Messaging, which provides messaging based on AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). It serves as an alternative to platforms such as IBM MQSeries. Iona's AMQP implementation was derived from the project.* Celtix Advanced Service Engine, based on the project, which merges the Apache Celtix and XFire projects. The services engine offers a pluggable services framework and supports standards such as SOAP and WS-Security.* Service routing and transformation capabilities from the .* Tooling for services development through the Eclipse SOA Tools Platform Project.

Iona with Celtix is trying to provide an entire SOA infrastructure stack in a single solution. Also packaged with Celtix are the Spring, ServiceMix, and Tomcat servlet containers, to enable customers to deploy services across a variety of technologies. The containers serve as runtime environments for deploying services.

Celtix differs from Iona's commercial Artix ESB, which is geared for much larger service deployments and can run on systems such as mainframes. Celtix runs on a Java Virtual Machine and can only integrate with over systems that use a JVM.

The Advanced Service Engine and Advanced Messaging components also will be available unbundled from Celtix. "For people who just want to get started in a lightweight, small-footprint kind of way, they can do that with the Celtix Advanced Service Engine," Moynihan said.