The Smooks team is proud to announce the release of Smooks v1.0.

The most commonly accepted definition of Smooks would be that it is a "Transformation Engine". However, at it's core, Smooks is just a "Structured Data Event Stream Processor". The core code makes no mention of "data transformation". It is designed simply to support hooking of custom "Visitor logic" into an Event Stream produced by a data Source of some kind (XML, CSV, EDI, Java etc).

Of course, the most common application of this will be in the creation of Transformation solutions i.e. implementing Visitor logic that uses the Event Stream, produced from a Source of one type (XML, EDI, CSV, Java etc), to produce a Result of some other type (XML, EDI, CSV, Java etc). These Event Stream Processing capabilities enable more than just Message Transformation. We have implemented a range of other solutions on top of this basic processing model:

1. Java Binding Framework: Use the Event Stream to create and populate a Java Object Model. It can actually create and populate multiple Object Models concurrently (i.e. in a single pass of the message), which can be very useful when splitting messages (see below). It can create and populate Object Models whose hierarchies don't "line up" with that of the Source message.
2. Java to Java Transforms: Transform between Java Object Models of different types.
3. Message Splitting & Routing: Split up a message and route the "split messages" to different destinations (with native support for File, JMS and Database destinations). Supports conditional routing (Content Based Routing) of each split message to multiple destinations of different types and in different formats (concurrently) e.g. XML1 to D1, Java1 to D2, Java2 to D3, EDI to D4 etc. Supports complex splits, where each split message contains data from different sub-hierarchies of the Source message i.e. not just dumb XPath based fragment splitting.
4. Huge Message Processing: Process GB size messages through Transformation, Splitting & Routing, or Persistence.
5. Message Enrichment: Enrich messages with data from external sources (e.g. a Database). Using a Splitting & Routing example, imagine splitting Order-Item messages out of an Order message, where the Customer details in each Order-Item split-message needs to be enriched with additional Customer info (e.g. addressing info), before routing the Order-Item split-message to a partner interface.
6. Fragment Based Transforms: Develop modular transformation logic, using a number of supported technologies (FreeMarker, XSLT, StringTemplate, Java, Groovy) and target them at message fragments. Avoid monolithic transformation solutions that are difficult to maintain. Avoid resource-hungry transformation pipelines. Supports mixing of technologies within the context of a single message transform.

Smooks is proving to be a very useful tool in the ESB/SOA world. It has been part of JBossESB since the early days and has, more recently, been made available in a number of other ESB Platforms (Mule and Apache Synapse/WS02, with others to follow).

For more on Smooks and the features outlined above, visit the project pages and download the v1.0 distribution. There are lots of well documented examples you can run out-of-the-box. Your feedback will be greatly appreciated!!