XAware's Data Integration App Goes Open Source
XAware Inc. has released its latest data integration software under an open source GPLv2 license and also achieved Gold Partner status in the MySQL Enterprise Connection Alliance program. MySQL is an open source database management solution.
XAware 5.0 is built on the Spring Framework and is a plugin that works with the open source Eclipse design environment. The product can be used to support traditional database applications, as well as applications where relational and XML data are mixed.
It helps to enable business processes in service-oriented architectures (SOAs) by "service-enabling" the data, according to Bill Miller, XAware's executive chairman.
"I really think of it as a data integration capability, but it's based on the idea of using SOA and Web services standards," Miller said. "So we service-enable data by connecting to existing data sources through many different available mechanisms, and it's a bidirectional connection."
XAware adds the kind of XML-based data handling capabilities to the open source MySQL database that is now featured prominently in proprietary database management solutions. Such XML handling capabilities, as introduced in Oracle Database 9i and IBM DB2 9, didn't previously exist for open source databases, Miller said.
"And the combination of XAware and MySQL actually gets you -- not only to that level that's available from Oracle and IBM -- but to an even greater level of being able to mashup not only the data in MySQL, but also the data that's coming from other Web services or outside or inside the company, data that might be in a text format (structured or semistructured) that can then be exposed as services," he explained.
XAware's Eclipse-based development environment features wizards that allow developers to specify dependencies between data sources and build data objects, and then those objects can be mapped into XML. The product provides an intermediate layer that enables sophisticated mapping, with logic that allows you to do it dynamically and have it executed at runtime, Miller said.
The product offers a flexible way to work with multiple data sources and construct data mashups, he added. It can also be used for a traditional data integration approach outside an SOA environment, such as ETL (extract, transform and load) and moving data from one store to another.