The project, incubated under the aegis of the Apache Software Foundation, will provide a core building block for Web service infrastructure software, including ESBs, Web services brokers, and Web services management products.

"As one of the first open source initiatives to develop an architectural model for Web services infrastructure, the Synapse project will be influential in driving the adoption of SOA principles among enterprise architects and developers," said Dave Chappell, vice president and chief technology evangelist for Sonic Software, and author of the O'Reilly book Enterprise Service Bus. "Service mediation has been a cornerstone of the ESB for several years now, and the Synapse project allows us to bring that concept to the open source community and work with them to vet out a mediation-centric model for building SOAs. As Apache AXIS has become the industry standard SOAP engine, Synapse will become the standard Web service mediation framework."

Synapse is an open source implementation of a Web service mediation framework and components for use in developing and deploying SOA infrastructures. Synapse provides a framework to intermediate between two or more Web Services, allowing users to introduce transformation and routing, promote loose coupling between services, and support greater reliability and resiliency.