The Apache Synapse project released Milestone 1 yesterday. From the homepage: "Synapse is a mediation framework for Web Services. Synapse allows messages flowing through, into, or out of an organization to be mediated." Milestone 1 supports:

• Simple mediation based on regex and xpath rules
• Onbound routing of messages
• Deploy simple Java mediators to perform logging, routing, message transform etc
• XSLT transformation of messages
• HTTP Proxy support
• Stages and in/out handling of messages

There are a number of SOA intermediary vendors, like Infravio supporting Synapse in the hope that it will spawn a standard, open source reference architecture for Web Services control points. Everyone wants to be in the run-time management business without having to manage all the connectors, gateways, and proxies that get managed.

I haven't played with Synapse yet, but it might be a fun thing to throw into my class next fall. I've been thinking of cutting out J2EE and just concentrating on Web Services. That would leave time for students to get their hands dirty with intermediaries, orchestration, and some other more advanced SOA artifacts.