Even if the announcement that Apache Software Foundation (ASF) granted Synapse separate, top-level project billing last week didn't generate major waves of uproar of reaction and commentary, it remains a significant move to the overall state of a burgeoning open source SOA arena. Initially, after first catching wind of Synapse in early spring of last year, I was thrown off slightly by some of the divergent descriptions/understandings of the effort that were floating around the web and as is the case with incubated open source projects it was a rapidly changing code base looking to grow in a more concisely defined direction over time.