Hi all,
Firstly, thanks very much for volunteering to work on Ikasan EIP. We'll try to fill out a few more details for you.
Mizuho International (Japanese investment bank) have open sourced parts of their middleware platform.
Although Mizuho International is the main user of Ikasan EIP at this stage, we've had some interest from other financial institutions. As such we, the original developer team, are looking for help from the community to make Ikasan EIP easier to build, deploy and use by others.
In the interests of full disclosure here are a couple of motivations:
Mizuho's core interest is investment banking, not middleware development. Opening up the platform means they can benefit from other contributions that they simply don't have the capacity or expertise for. However, to be clear:
"No-one in the Ikasan EIP community that is not employed or contracted to Mizuho is obliged to work on Mizuho specific requirements in any way shape or form."
There will be lots of items in our issue register that are generic requirements and there will be plenty of suggestions from the yourselves and the rest of the community for other enhancements.
Hopefully a few things:
Ikasan EIP is a fairly complex bit of software, not to mention the typical enterprise environment it runs on! However, a successful open source project needs lots of people in all sorts of roles from Developers, testers, documenters, Administrators, Graphic Designers and more. There's a whole range of roles you can take on or tasks to tackle from the very small (Spelling mistakes in the Wiki!) to the large (A new JCA connector for a trading vendor feed).
At this stage 6 employees and/or contractors that work for Mizuho International are part or full time workers on this project. They are the current committers to the project and therefore form the 'council' that has voting power.
Any new member joining the project team whether it be from Mizuho or the community will start on the same footing, e.g. Mizuho employees will not gain committer access just because they work for Mizuho, they must show the high standard levels we'd expect from a committer before they gain access.
Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have trouble with any of these steps.
You should visit your appropriate section in the wiki so either Administrators, Developers, or Graphic Designers. They all have getting started guides.
Any questions, comments etc please don't hesitate to get in touch (do post to the developers mailing list in the first instance if you can so all can share in the question and answer), we're still feeling our way in how this is all going to work, so don't hesitate to pipe up!
Cheers,
Ikasan Development Team