The swordfish (xiphias gladius) uses its sharp elongated bill to slash through its prey making sushi of smaller fish.

Likewise, the advocates of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform codenamed Swordfish, which is now making its way through the Eclipse incubator process, argue it will slash through obstacles to SOA development.

Those obstacles include political infighting between advocates of the Java Business Integration (JBI) and Service Component Architecture (SCA) specifications as well as features missing in the Java Enterprise Edition (JEE), said Ricco Deutscher, CTO at SOPERA GmbH, a spinoff of Deutsche Post AG. The parent company developed its own SOA platform to handle logistics applications. Deutscher is now leading the open sourcing of the Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi)-based SOA platform in Eclipse.