Breaking News - Operating Systems
& Middleware:
Sonic Software Releases Sonic ESB
5.0
Sonic Software announced the availability of Sonic ESB 5.0 (formerly
SonicXQ), the foundation of Sonic's enterprise integration product line:
the Sonic Business Integration Suite. Sonic ESB provides a distributed,
standards-based, cost-effective, easily managed infrastructure that reliably
integrates applications and orchestrates business processes across the
extended enterprise 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 proven enterprise-grade communications and management
infrastructure of SonicMQ, the industry's most scalable enterprise message
server, Sonic ESB 5.0 includes new capabilities that streamline and simplify
the configuration, deployment, instrumentation and management of distributed,
standards-based integration projects. 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 also extends
Sonic's leadership in scalability and availability for mission critical
environments, and includes a pluggable security framework to ensure that the
infrastructure honors existing corporate security policies. Sonic ESB 5.0 also
includes Sonic Stylus Studio, the award-winning XML development
environment that delivers new levels of developer productivity to integration
projects.
The enterprise service bus category has taken shape very rapidly within the
last twelve months. ESBs are built on five key principles:
1) Service-oriented architecture (SOA). ESBs implement a service-oriented
architecture (SOA), supporting 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.
2) Enterprise-grade communications backbone. ESBs must provide an
enterprise-
grade communications backbone required to reliably connect applications across
multiple geographic, administrative or security domains, based on the Java
Message Server (JMS) standard.
3) 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 dramatically reduce the implementation time and
total cost of ownership of integration projects.
4) Intelligent routing. ESBs automate business transaction routing based on
XML document contents and business rules. This eliminates the need to hardcode
this functionality into application code or establish rigid relationships
between services.
5) Deployment flexibility and distributed management. ESBs provide the
ability
to centrally configure, deploy, and manage services that are distributed
across the enterprise. Unlike centralized, monolithic application server or
integration broker architectures, ESB's allow for optimal flexibility, and
further allow services to be managed and scaled independently of each other
for operational efficiency. Location transparency allows services to be
upgraded, moved, or replaced without having to modify any application
code.
"The ESB is an open standards-based technology concept that will
revolutionize
IT and enable flexible and scalable distributed computing for generations to
come," said Sally Hudson, research manager of software infrastructure, IDC.
"The ESB is emerging as the backbone of the distributed framework within
enterprise IT, because it allows not only the retention and deployment of
existing business critical applications, but also allows the user to introduce
and remove newer applications as needed."
"The future of where command and control is going to go is towards the
enterprise service bus concept. With Sonic, our next-generation Command and
Control Interoperable, Collaborative Enterprise, or C2ICE platform, enables
the networked integration and management of hundreds and even thousands of
disparate data sources, including weather, intelligence, legacy databases and
remote digital surveillance devices," said Jon Johnson, chief engineer for
Northrop Grumman Mission Systems, Colorado Spring Engineering Organization, a
leading provider of government and civil command, control and intelligence
systems. "The Sonic ESB product will put us way ahead in that we no longer
have to care about what kind of middleware is in Department of Defense and
homeland security systems as they stand alone."
"ESBs enable incremental integration, allowing organizations to start with
departmental integration projects, safe in the knowledge that they can readily
extend the integration infrastructure as broadly as necessary," said Gordon
Van Huizen, vice president of product management for Sonic Software. "As a
result ESBs are cost-effective, yet provide organizations with the ability to
scale to large numbers of applications and services across a distributed
enterprise. Moreover, ESBs allow organizations to leverage the two most highly
valued assets in the IT organization: the existing infrastructure and their IT
staff."
Enhancements in Sonic ESB 5.0 include:
- Enhanced Distributed Management Framework--A Java Management Extensions
(JMX)-based management infrastructure makes configuration, deployment,
monitoring and diagnosis of thousands of distributed services possible. All of
these management functions can be performed from a unified management
dashboard.
- High Availability & Scalability--Sonic ESB provides transparent access to
redundant communication servers to enable the high-availability required by
mission critical deployments.
- Pluggable Security--A pluggable security framework provides the ability to
integrate across the multiple security domains that co-exist within an
enterprise, or between business partners. This ensures that connected
information and applications honor established security policies.
- Integrated Development Tools--Sonic ESB is integrated with Sonic Stylus
Studio, an award-winning XML development tool that includes a visual XSLT
transformation mapper and debugger and an XQuery expression builder, as well
as XML document and schema editors. With this new tool bundle, developer
productivity increases to rapidly accelerate time-to-deployment for these
projects.
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