Red Hat, in conjunction with the open source community, released JBoss ESB 4.2, a JBoss.org open source project. JBoss ESB 4.2 intermediates interactions between enterprise applications, business services, business components, and middleware to integrate and enable the automation of business processes.

JBoss ESB 4.2 supports various messaging products for transport, component models as SOA end points, data integration from Hibernate and MetaMatrix federated data sources, and data transformation for seamless communication. JBoss ESB 4.2 provides a registry for service discovery and integration and is designed to enable simple to advanced SOA governance software from the open source community and commercial software vendors such as AmberPoint and SOA SW. Due to its flexible and open architecture, JBoss ESB enables partner products, such as Jitterbit’s data transformation offering, to plug in to supplement and extend JBoss ESB deployments.

JBoss ESB is a second-generation SOA foundation due to its inherent flexibility to be configured to specific use-case scenarios as well as its agnostic architecture, which is not based on a specific technology such as JMS, JBI or Web services like many first-generation ESBs.