Passerelle is a component-based solution assembly suite developed and distributed by iSencia Belgium since 2002.

It is based on an integration and on extensions of Ptolemy II (Univ. Berkeley), OSGi/Equinox & other smaller OS libraries.

Passerelle is already used for several years in “production-mode” at different customers (e.g. leading Belgian telecom for its automated repair diagnostic engine ; recent french synchrotron for control and data acquisition for experiments on beamlines…).

In the near future, Passerelle’s usage in the synchrotron domain will be extended towards an integration in a desktop tool, based on eclipse RCP, for visiting scientists, where Passerelle will serve as a data analysis sequencer/workflow.

To better support this new distribution model, in such a scientific community, we have decided together with the customer consortium involved to go towards a regular open source model.

The main deliverable of this open source project will be a graphical editor and execution environment delivered as a set of OSGi bundles and eclipse plugins together with a prepackaged eclipse RCP application.

This is currently in beta and being further developed within iSencia. A 1st usable version is planned before the end of 2009, and will then replace the current IDE based on an old version of the Netbeans platform.

From then onwards, participation is expected from developers within different synchrotrons around Europe.

As the application domain of the tool is however much wider, we hope to gradually grow a multi-disciplinary community around this project.