Neat, seems like the site is getting slammed, and what I really wanted to know was a summary of what it's about, here is for the benefit of others:
"Turmeric is a comprehensive, policy-driven SOA platform that you can use to develop, deploy, secure, run and monitor SOA services and consumers. It is a Java based platform, and follows the standards (WSDL, SOAP, XML, JSON, XACML, etc.). Eclipse plugins help with the development of services and consumers. Other important features include:
Various Quality of Service (QoS) features such as authentication, authorization, and rate limiting, which you control by defining respective policies.
Monitoring capabilities.
A Repository Service that enables service registration and governance.
The Type Library, which provides the ability to define and manage reusable schema type definitions across services, and hierarchically organizes them.
The Error Library, another useful capability that lets you define and re-use error definitions across services.
Local binding, which lets you locally bind services to consumers as a deployment time option, for optimization, without loss of any generality or changing code.
The Turmeric platform is highly extensible and customizable. For example, you can easily plug in additional protocol processors, data formats, handlers and various other capabilities. The platform is also highly optimized for large-scale environments. eBay uses this platform internally. Most parts of it are now open source, replacing functionality dependent on commercial products with equivalent, open-source implementations. It also has new package names to match the open-source spirit. This is the first version of the open-source release of Turmeric, and might have some rough edges, so please provide feedback and contribute as you see fit."
Looks like a very extensive platform, great to see another major company open-sourcing their product. For me, the key question now is what level of support will be offered (by Ebay and/or the general developer community). Once this project achieves a bit of momentum from other companies' implementations I can see it presenting a very viable option for larger-scale deployments.
Please remember that SOA is an approach to development and to architecture. Having a "SOA platform" is nice but, without the service oriented thinking, it gets you exactly 0% of the way towards having an actual service oriented architecture.
Service Oriented Architecture in short allows companies to compose new web services or re-use existing web services.
eg: A check-driving-history module in an auto-insurance company software can be externalized as a web service.
Various SOA platforms provide tooling via eclipse plugins or standalone IDEs and run time environments (as application servers) to compose web services in different programming languages like BPEL, Java etc.
You can manage versions of your web services using the platform (eg: webservice_v1.1 talks to A and webservice_v1.2 talks to B).
You can add access control to your web services.
You can monitor your web services, start and stop them using the monitoring tools provided.
I've worked on a team that built a SOA platform. I am not sure if any existing platform delivers half the things it promises. It sure helps management feel that they are agile and can compose services quickly to changing business needs.
Reading the pages makes me die a little inside with each line. My favourite has got to be:
'[Tumeric] follows the standards (WSDL, SOAP, XML, JSON, XACML, etc.)'.
What a delightfully vacuous phrase.
I would hope that no-one sane will ever have to use this outside eBay. Seems an odd choice to be open sourced, probably someone very proud of the years they wasted architecture astronauting to support a bunch of stillborn standards.
Sorry to be so vitriolic, but this project seems to mention every poorly conceived enterprise programming idea I have ever had the displeasure of coming across.
"Turmeric is a comprehensive, policy-driven SOA platform that you can use to develop, deploy, secure, run and monitor SOA services and consumers. It is a Java based platform, and follows the standards (WSDL, SOAP, XML, JSON, XACML, etc.). Eclipse plugins help with the development of services and consumers. Other important features include:
Various Quality of Service (QoS) features such as authentication, authorization, and rate limiting, which you control by defining respective policies. Monitoring capabilities. A Repository Service that enables service registration and governance. The Type Library, which provides the ability to define and manage reusable schema type definitions across services, and hierarchically organizes them. The Error Library, another useful capability that lets you define and re-use error definitions across services. Local binding, which lets you locally bind services to consumers as a deployment time option, for optimization, without loss of any generality or changing code. The Turmeric platform is highly extensible and customizable. For example, you can easily plug in additional protocol processors, data formats, handlers and various other capabilities. The platform is also highly optimized for large-scale environments. eBay uses this platform internally. Most parts of it are now open source, replacing functionality dependent on commercial products with equivalent, open-source implementations. It also has new package names to match the open-source spirit. This is the first version of the open-source release of Turmeric, and might have some rough edges, so please provide feedback and contribute as you see fit."