Deutsche Post spin-off Sopera GmbH has waded into the cloud game with what it calls a next-generation application development platform.

The company's Eclipse SOA initiative offers a platform in Eclipse, the IBM-started open source IDE, for building service-oriented architecture (SOA) programs. It will include a new service registry/repository, integrate process orchestration engines, and provide integration between the Eclipse Swordfish (SOA Runtime Framework) and the SOA Tooling Platform (STP).

Sopera and the Eclipse Foundation have announced the upcoming release of Swordfish, a next-generation enterprise service bus (ESB) for deploying an SOA strategy. It's based on the OSGi standard and builds on open source technologies such as Eclipse Equinox and Apache ServiceMix.

Swordfish is based on real-world SOA deployments at Deutsche Post and is supposed to provide the features and extensible framework required by enterprises and system integrators to customize their ESB to meet the specific needs of an enterprise.

Eclipse SOA provides an integrated platform for service-oriented application development in Eclipse, letting business application developers use Eclipse for more than just writing client or rich client applications. It can underlie the next step - building powerful service-oriented applications with one of the more widely used integrated development environments (IDEs).

In February, Sopera joined with Microsoft and Open-Xchange under the umbrella of the Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF) (www.osbf.de), the non-profit European open source business network, to announce a platform that leverages service-oriented architecture (SOA) for cloud computing for the first time.

The Internet Service Bus (ISB) makes applications accessible as a service regardless of whether they are on-premise or on the Internet, enabling developers to access and use existing, proven code to build composite applications. At the same time, the ISB creates a bridge between Java and .NET software applications and ensures seamless interoperability. The ISB, which is based on the Sopera open source platform, was demonstrated during CeBit in Germany as a prototype integrating Open-Xchange, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Virtual Earth into one integrated solution.

Spun off from Deutsche Post in 2007, Sopera peddles an open source, modular, standard-based SOA suite, supporting best-of-breed concepts and the SOA lifecycle.