XAware

XAware was a U.S.-based technology company and current Open Source project that created an enterprise information integration (EII) software product to deliver data services for service-oriented architectures. Officially founded in 1999 in Colorado Springs, CO, the software was an implementation of patented data integration technology (patent pending at the time),^[1] and extended over many years of development. The software helps companies with a large number of databases and systems to make use of data in new ways by packaging the data as callable "services". Customers of XAware software included large companies in the financial services and insurance industries.

In 2007, the company placed large portions of the software product into open source, hosted at SourceForge.^[2]

XAware was acquired by Sparxent, Inc. in 2009. Sparxent terminated support of the XAware product in 2013, and the product continued to be supported as an open source project on SourceForge and at www.xaware.org.^[3]

Technology

The XAware product guides the user through developing a data service which fetches data from multiple data sources, then exposes all the data as a single logical view. An Eclipse-based design environment lets the user select and query from data sources of different formats and transports (SQL, delimited text, fixed length text, JSON, REST services, SOAP services, etc). The environment encourages a "contract first" development flow where the user begins with a target format (such as an XML Schema), which defines the output format of the data services. The user then selects various data sources to populate different sections of the target format. The service is then deployed to the XAware server, which runs within common application servers (JBoss Wildfly and Apache Tomcat are naively supported). Applications that need the data are then able to make a request using a number of transports, notably HTTP, REST, or SOAP to retrieve the data. Views can also be developed which consume data, in which case an application sends an XML or JSON structure to the view, and the view decomposes the data and sends each piece to the appropriate system or database.

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