Rocket Software has released version 5.2.0 of the U2 Web Development Environment (U2 Web DE), a tool that provides an environment to handle incoming requests and outgoing responses that are often variable in volume. Upgraded features include monitoring, logging improvements, and RESTful services.
Users will now be able to keep track of their website responsiveness via monitoring with traffic light indicators. The new monitoring features will allow for troubleshooting when organizations are faced with high demand, and help identify areas to improve or adjust license consumption.
“In our customer advisory boards, we had a discussion around the difficulties in troubleshooting a system,” stated Laura Pettett, product manager, MultiValue Tools, Rocket Software. “For example, say you get a bottleneck in processing requests that are coming from your website and your customers are kept waiting for a response. That wouldn’t be good if the customer were to give up and go away. Or, if you want to assess how efficient your system is running when you have a big surge in usage – like around a holiday rush or when you publish new sale prices. You need one place to be able to look to determine the health of your system and to get the clues on what may need to be adjusted to ensure you have high availability and fast responses to your customers.”
Logging has been improved as well in the new release. With version 5.2.0 users can quickly identify slow processes, keep track of the distribution of requests across database licenses, and see any database or basic errors that may have occurred. Logs can be set to gather statistics on an adjustable timed basis and can be turned on or off without restarting the scheduler.
Version 5.2.0 will also allow users to expose their existing web logic for use in mobile applications via RESTful services. “We first introduced RESTful services for use in going mobile in our U2 Web DE 5.1.0 release in 2013 but have enhanced it in this release,” said Pettett. “The advantage to introducing RESTful services is that you can reuse all of your U2 business logic and existing U2 Web DE RedBack Objects (RBOs) and not have to rewrite that code when you want to expose it for use in mobile applications or even in other tools and frameworks that communicate via REST. This opens your U2 system up to many different options. For example, if you wanted to write a web application with Node.js, you could have U2 Web DE provide all of the back-end business logic. Alternatively, you could use that same business logic in a mobile application running on your smartphone. All of this is possible via the RESTful services API we provide.”
All of the functionality of earlier versions will be supported in the new version and there is no charge to upgrade for customers currently on maintenance. For more information, go here.