The open source projects Proteus and Babeldoc both announced new releases. Although they look very different (one is a "framework", the other is a "system"), both are written in Java, support XML, EJBs and JDBC databases and do not hide that EAI is their vocation.

Proteus

Proteus is presented as a framework, ie more as a library to integrate with your application than as a complete environment:

Proteus is a framework for creating messaging applications, and a message broker built upon that framework. Proteus has adapters that allow databases, message queues, ftp servers, email and other message sources and sinks to be addressed in a simple, uniform fashion. It differs in approach from most other toolkits in supporting both centralized and point to point implementations with a minimal footprint.

Proteus is built on a small number of basic components (message sources and sinks, filters, routers and brokers) which assembly may be described in XML documents. The documentation of its API shows that these components are defined as very simple interfaces and this should make this framework highly extensible. Proteus appears to plan using this extensibility to add new features and its home page announces that new adapters for e-mail messages, flat files, Tibco Rendezvous and WebMethods will be available soon.

Despite detailed documentation, I found no mention about administration tools or processes.

Babeldoc

Babeldoc is presented as a system to process documents which is "not a replacement for webmethods (yet)" and puts a lot of emphasis on its admin and journaling features:

Babeldoc is a document processing system. Babeldoc is especially suited for Business-to-Business (B2B) environments and similar integration projects. Babeldoc has a flexible and reconfigurable processing pipeline through which documents flow. These pipelines transform the document. Additionally Babeldoc has a sophisticated and extensible journaling system so that documents may be reprocessed and resubmitted as well as tracked through the system. Its runtime environment is flexible so that it can run standalone, in a web container or in a J2EE container (currently tested on Jboss 2.4.x and JBoss 3.0.x). Babeldoc has both a Web console, a number of GUI tools and a command-line console to control the document flow.

As might be expected, the description of these pipelines is written in XML and, despite Babeldoc's "complete system" intent, I found no Javadoc for its API online.