Update 12/14/2007 - A great article from Rich Seeley on the hybrid approach initiated with this weeks' releases.
My favorite part of this week's announcements around Artix and FUSE is the support for enterprise integration patterns (EIP).
When I was in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago I heard that a former colleague, now working for Accenture, has recently been giving presentations about the applicability of these patterns to addressing various enterprise IT problems. It actually makes a lot of sense that people would want to have their software products directly support the development and deployment of common patterns - whether in the integration space or not.
EIP support in both Artix and FUSE is derived from the Apache Camel project. As we say around IONA, and as I hope everyone knows, a camel is superior to a mule... ;-)
Illustration of some of the Integration Patterns Now in Artix
I also think it's great that Camel is using the domain specific language (DSL) approach, since I've been a fan of DSL for a long time, although two years ago I was characterizing DSLs in opposition to UML/MDA. Since then I believe MDA has turned more toward modeling than executable code, which is good, and annotations and aspects have kind of arisen to take their place.
Eclipse tooling shapshot for EIP
At the Eclipse Board meeting here in San Francisco I just presented an update on the SOA Tools Platform Project, including the snapshot accessible via the above link that illustrates what we're working on in that project to generically support EIP through open source tooling.
I may be wrong here but I think the convergence of these two trends is going to be huge - the identification, characterization, and codification of EIP - and the specialization of DSLs to solve specific computing problems.