Announcements are being made at the JBoss World Berlin conference in Germany.

JBoss' middleware is critical to parent company Red Hat's SOA strategy. "SOA is really the broad framework of the JBoss [announcement]," Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens said.

Part of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS), JBoss ESB 4.0 provides intermediation between enterprise applications, business services, components and middleware. The ESB, like all of the JEMS stack, runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

"ESB is the platform for bringing a SOA together," said Pierre Fricke, JBoss director of product management.

The ESB leverages JEMS technologies such as the JBoss business rules engine for content-based routing and JBossMQ for messaging. JBoss plans to extend JBoss ESB with additional JEMS products such as jBoss jBPM for business process management and workflow. Partners can extend the ESB with connectors, B2B gateways and SOA governance. JBoss's ESB is comprised of a technology donation from an insurance company plus contributions from JBoss and other open source projects.