Progress Software South Africa has announced the local availability of Sonic Software`s ESB 5.0 (formerly SonicXQ), the foundation of its enterprise integration product line, the Sonic Business Integration Suite.
Sonic ESB (Enterprise Service bus provides a distributed, standards-based infrastructure that reliably integrates applications and orchestrates business processes across companies and their supply chain using Web services and the J2EE Connector Architecture.
Sonic`s standards-based approach to distributed integration is more flexible and cost-effective than integration brokers or application servers.
Leveraging the enterprise-grade communications and management infrastructure of SonicMQ, Sonic ESB 5.0 includes new capabilities that streamline and simplify the configuration, deployment, instrumentation and management of distributed, standards-based integration projects.
"ESBs enable incremental integration, allowing organisations to start with departmental integration projects, safe in the knowledge that they can readily extend the integration infrastructure as broadly as necessary," says Rick Parry, MD of Progress Software South Africa. "ESBs are cost-effective, yet they allow organisations to scale to large numbers of applications and services across a distributed enterprise. In addition, ESBs allow organisations to leverage the two most highly valued assets in the IT organisation: the existing infrastructure and their IT staff."
Sonic ESB 5.0 includes an enhanced management framework that allows companies to configure and monitor large integration networks from a single dashboard.
This release extends Sonic`s scalability and availability for mission-critical environments, and includes a pluggable security framework to ensure that the infrastructure honours existing corporate security policies.
Sonic ESB 5.0 includes Sonic Stylus Studio, the XML development environment that enhances developer productivity to integration projects.
The enterprise service bus category has taken shape rapidly in the last year. ESBs are built on five key principles:
* Service-oriented architecture (SOA). ESBs support service-based interactions among cooperating applications based on XML messages and enhanced Web services standards. This allows interactions between departments, business units, or with business partners to be defined in coarse-grained business terms, rather than in complex and brittle application interfaces. As a result, ESBs can accommodate and absorb significant change in the implementation details of individual applications or services connected to the bus.
* Enterprise-grade communications backbone. ESBs must provide an enterprise-grade communications backbone required to connect applications reliably across multiple geographic, administrative or security domains, based on the Java Message Server (JMS) standard.
* Support for standards. By supporting standard methods and mechanisms to develop and interconnect applications across the enterprise, such as WSDL, SOAP, JMS and J2EE-CA, ESBs reduce the implementation time and total cost of ownership of integration projects.
* Intelligent routing. ESBs automate business transaction routing based on XML document contents and business rules. This eliminates the need to hard-code this functionality into application code or establish rigid relationships between services.
* Deployment flexibility and distributed management. ESBs provide the ability centrally to configure, deploy, and manage distributed services. Unlike centralised, monolithic application server or integration broker architectures, ESBs allow for optimal flexibility, and further allow services to be managed and scaled independently of each other. Location transparency allows services to be upgraded, moved, or replaced without modifying application code.
"The ESB is an open standards-based technology concept that will revolutionise IT and enable flexible and scalable distributed computing for generations to come," says Sally Hudson, research manager of software infrastructure, IDC. "The ESB is emerging as the backbone of the distributed framework in enterprise IT, because it allows not only the retention and deployment of existing business critical applications, but it also allows the user to introduce and remove newer applications as needed."
Enhancements in Sonic ESB 5.0 include:
* Enhanced distributed management framework: A Java Management Extensions (JMX)-based management infrastructure enables configuration, deployment, monitoring and diagnosis of thousands of distributed services. All of these management functions can be performed from a unified dashboard.
* High availability and scalability: Sonic ESB provides transparent access to redundant communication servers to enable high availability.
* Pluggable security: A pluggable security framework provides the ability to integrate across the multiple security domains that co-exist in a company, or between business partners. This ensures that connected information and applications honour established security policies.
* Integrated development tools: Sonic ESB is integrated with Sonic Stylus Studio, the XML development tool that includes a visual XSLT transformation mapper and debugger, an XQuery expression builder, and XML document and schema editors. With this new tool bundle, developer productivity increases to accelerate time to deployment for these projects.
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