Progress Software Corporation, a provider of application infrastructure software, announced the latest release of its Actional software, intended to provide reliability to business transactions. Progress Actional 8.0 Enterprise, the vendor says, delivers "business transaction assurance" by providing full design-time to run-time application lifecycle validation, and execution-time visibility and control for distributed applications. The goal is to help businesses avoid losing a single important transaction, Progress says.
This release follows the announcement earlier this year of Actional Diagnostics, a free standalone quality and validation desktop product that helps applications developers, build, test, and deliver high quality XML-based services, including SOAP, REST, and POX (Plain Old XML). Actional Diagnostics leverages Mindreef SOAPscope technology acquired in June 2008 by Progress.
A key focus of the new release is to address the full lifecycle, Dan Foody, vice president of Actional Products, Progress Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "You saw the first piece of that with the launch of Actional Diagnostics, but we have launched the combined rest of the product line that addresses the remaining parts of the lifecycle and brings the Actional and Mindreef products together into one unified set of packages."
Actional Application Development is intended for everyone in pre-production, who needs to work together, including developers through QA, through deployment teams; and then Actional Enterprise "is designed to span the entire lifecycle all the way from development through production and application support-so moving to the full lifecycle is a key aspect," notes Foody.
Actional 8.0 Enterprise allows IT professionals to collaborate across an enterprise to detect, diagnose, and repair problems and exceptions that disrupt business transactions, as well as prevent them from recurring.
Actional 8.0 Enterprise complements application management tools, which the company says are unable to pinpoint or prevent many types of business transaction problems, including business exceptions such as invalid data entry that goes undetected, situational issues such as problems that affect only one customer, partner or channel, or stalled processes. Moreover, Actional 8.0 Enterprise proactively ensures transaction reliability, beginning during the application development phase, to create higher quality services that are less likely to fail in QA, performance testing, or in production.
Actional 8.0 Enterprise can support more than 1,000 monitoring and control nodes from a single server while using less than two percent of the CPU's capacity on the managed node, which the company says is critical in its ability to provide the necessary scalability and performance for business transaction assurance. In Actional 8.0, platform support is expanded to include Apache CXF and Camel, Oracle Service Bus, Progress Artix Data Services, TIBCO Business Works, SAP NetWeaver, WebMethods Integration Server, and support for POX and REST services.
For complete information on the capabilities of Actional 8.0, go here.