JBoss plans to offer an open source enterprise service bus (ESB) in 2006, the company said.

The company views an ESB as a foundation for providing standardized data integration. Based on the Java Business Integration specification, the bus will link to components from JBoss and others, such as JBoss Web services stack and the JBoss jBPM (Java Business Process Management) system for process orchestration.

"All of these things will be able to be plugged into the ESB over time," said Pierre Fricke, director of product management at JBoss.

To be called JBoss Enterprise Service Bus, it will feature the planned JBoss Messaging product as its messaging backbone, with the messaging product built on the Java Message Service specification. "[JBoss Messaging is] going to be the foundation that we build our ESB on," Fricke said.

"The JBoss folks are clearly trying with the ESB product and the other products they"ve announced recently and over time to build a full SOA stack similar to what you would get from an IBM or an Oracle or a BEA," said analyst Steve Garone, a vice president at Ideas International. JBoss can leverage any element of its stack to offer other parts of it to customers as well, Garone said.

JBoss" open source message, however, is becoming less important because JBoss, with a lot of control of its products, and traditional software companies, which lately are opening up access to their software, are looking more similar, Garone said.

By providing an ESB, JBoss would join a host of providers, both open source and commercial, who are offering ESBs. BEA Systems, for example, began selling an ESB in August.

Serving as a replacement for JBossMQ, JBoss Messaging will have enhanced high availability and improved performance. It will arrive in 2006 prior to the ESB.

JBoss will reveal JBoss Enterprise Service Bus and JBoss Messaging at the JBoss World, Barcelona conference in Spain this week.