Sonic upgrades ESB, touts SOA benefits

Sonic Software is upgrading its enterprise service buses (ESB) Monday, with the company touting what it calls the industry's only third-generation ESB.

Often credited for inventing the term ESB, Sonic views an ESB as providing on-ramping of services in an SOA. "The main purpose of the ESB is to really allow you to scale up SOAs to mission-critical usage," Dan Foody, Sonic CTO, said.

Sonic ESB 7.0 is the company's third generation of product, it says. Sonic ESB 7.0 improvements focus on graphical tools in the Sonic Workbench, which provides modeling, configuring, testing and deploying of composite applications and business processes on the ESB. The new workbench extends business process modeling to business analysts; it previously was geared to developers only.

"A business analyst may do the high-level model and developers may do the configuration that makes that process executable," said Foody.

Testing and debugging have been improved in the workbench as well. "With Workbench 7.0, you can debug an end-to-end business process regardless of how many places that process is running or regardless of how many places the parts of that process [are] running," Foody said. Debugging, meanwhile, now can be done on a production system in an SOA environment.

Workbench 7.0 also features automated tools for dependency and impact analysis. Also, Sonic has added what it terms enterprise-level support for new advanced Web services standards, such as WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Security, WS-Addressing and WS-Policy. These standards provide mission-critical reliability in HTTP environments, said Foody.