Progress Software Corporation, a provider of IT and data management solutions, is shipping the latest release of its Sonic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Sonic 8.0. The new release leverages open development standards, continuous availability and scalability for multi-site, high-transaction environments.
A major highlight of the Sonic 8.0 release is its support for a RESTful approach to integration, as well as new enhancements supporting the development and hosting of traditional web services. RESTful Web Services within the Sonic ESB enables easy integration with portals, mashups, mobile devices, and any web-based application. It delivers high scalability, and is seen as a key architectural choice by many companies for its simplicity, breadth of integration, and alignment with the web. Traditional web service support within Sonic 8.0 has gained significant enhancements, providing improved performance, a simplified development model, topological flexibility, and broader support of industry standards
Both RESTful web services and traditional web services are developed through open standards instead of a proprietary application programming interface. Adoption of these open standards is going to improve development productivity, Jonathan Daly, product marketing manager for integration infrastructure products at Progress Software. "It is really going to reduce vendor lock-in and it is going to provide people with a portable code set that they should feel comfortable with. We are embracing these standards because we believe it's the right thing to do, and it is really going to empower our customers."
The Progress Sonic ESB platform performs a significant role in the Progress Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite. It provides enterprises with the ability to sense and respond to events and continuously improve their business processes. As an event-driven messaging bus, the Sonic ESB platform translates all systems connected to the ESB into event sources for the Progress RPM suite, enabling organizations to become more operationally responsive.
With multi-site integration, and what Progress calls "dynamic routing architecture," users can do centralized installation. Before, users were offered centralized upgrade and management. Now, they can install global deployments from one location, decreasing the chances of location-based discrepancies and ensuring that have uniform installation across the world, which has a waterfall effect when they get to upgrades, and management and patches, explains Daly.
The new release also provides new modeling technology. "Now, before you deploy into a runtime or production environment, we are going to allow you to model that exact environment in your design time and your QA area so that you can recognize all the idiosyncrasies and differences that each location that you are deploying to bears." This enables a company to adjust for the network, the hardware, the server power at each location and tweak each installation in the design time and test it against those different characteristic so when it deploys to runtime there are no surprises, Daly notes. Additionally, the patented Continuous Availability Architecture within the Sonic ESB platform is enhanced in Sonic 8.0 and delivers "zero-downtime" upgrades and patches to highly distributed, live environments from a centralized location.
For more information, go here.