Progress Software has announced the availability of Sonic ESB 7.6, its market-leading, messaging-based enterprise service bus (ESB).
This release offers greater productivity for developers and for managing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure across heterogeneous environments.
Sonic ESB offers enterprises a powerful alternative to centralised and monolithic middleware stacks by providing them with the ability to integrate new and existing business services across their organisational boundaries, as well as connect to remote sites with low latency, high reliability and continuous availability.
Sonic ESB 7.6 allows developers to create the most complex service orchestrations from the top down quickly and easily through drag-and-drop functionality, and iterative development processes.
In addition, it features embedded prototype services that allow developers to build and test services without developing them fully. Also, this release includes the addition of new process templates, which enable developers to capture their own best practices and repeat or share them for reuse.
Sonic ESB 7.6 also includes the Sonic Workbench, which is an Eclipse-based SOA graphical toolset that can be used to model, configure, test and deploy processes and services. These graphical tools make it easy to specify configuration and deployment details that support an intuitive top-down approach to a SOA development lifecycle.
Tutorials, available in print and video format, provide developers with best-practice scenarios that help them create new services. For example, included in the tutorial are two popular use-case scenarios: "batch to real-time" and "remote information access" services.
These tutorials will help developers, who are new to SOA and ESB technologies, to quickly become productive.
In Gartner's "Hype Cycle for Application Infrastructure Middleware, Platforms and Architecture 2007", analysts Roy Schulte, Jess Thompson and Kimihikio Iijima wrote: "The SOA and integration market is dynamic, with a relatively high rate of mergers and acquisitions. Therefore, companies buying an ESB product or another SOA middleware infrastructure product that contains an ESB product should consider the product viability and vendor viability, as well as the ease of development, standards compliance, quality of local support, administrative tools and feature richness."
Rick Parry, MD of Progress Software South Africa, comments: "The release of Sonic ESB 7.6 most certainly hits upon all of the requirements outlined by Gartner, from its ease of use to its feature-rich functionality.
"In addition to its financial strength and stability needed for long-term customer and product support, Progress offers customers a portfolio of best-in-class SOA infrastructure products that supports their multi-vendor SOA environments."
Parry adds that Sonic has made significant inroads into the South Africa market, where it is being used for integration and as a backbone for SOA projects.
Sonic ESB 7.6 is available for free downloading and evaluation at: http://www.sonicsoftware.com/products/sonic_workbench/eval_downloads/index.ssp
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Progress Software Corporation provides application infrastructure software for the development, deployment, integration and management of business applications. Its goal is to maximise the benefits of information technology while minimising its complexity and total cost of ownership.
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