Last November a number of O.K.I. OSID developers gathered in Cambridge Massachusetts for an OSID V3 "Deep-Dive" meeting to review the current V3 draft and discuss issues to address and potential projects moving forward.  One of the projects discussed, and identified as an important direction by many of those assembled, is the development of an enterprise service bus based on the V3 OSIDS.  The Open University of Catalonia has already proven the viability and value of such a bus implementation of a number of the V2 OSIDs as part of the Campus Project 

Mark Norton, of Nolaria Consulting,  volunteered to start up a new project group to further explore an OSID V3 Service Bus.  Anyone is invited to join the Google group at http://groups.google.com/group/osid-service-bus.  

This discussion group is open to everyone interested in contributing or just tracking the conversation.  If you are interested please join the group. A Google account in required to join this group.  The group will be documenting any code in the group wiki, track issues with the issue manager, and save prototype code in the source control system (subversion).  Released code will be cross posted to Assembla.

The goal is to build a standard way to make OSID requests, across a network, across multiple programming languages and potentially coordinating service requests across multiple elements of enterprise infrastructure.  Such systems are commonly referred to as *enterprise* service busses. Usually, such ESB system uses web services, CORBA, RMI, AJAX, REST, message protocols, etc. to send a request to one or more service providers (that may be local or remote).  The provider creates a response that is communicated back to the requesting application (or service).

The ESB hides details how communication happens, where the service providers live, etc.  It can also provide commonly used features like publish/subscribe messaging, broadcast messages, point to point messaging, journaling, transactionality, etc.  The OSID Service Bus (OSB) project proposes to first explore the ideas using some simple test cases (login, get asset, etc) hopefully using two or more languages.  The project also plan to investigate existing ESB open source offerings to see what might be adopted as the basis for an OSB platform.

If you have specific questions about the project, please contact markjnorton@earthlink.net.