The market for Enterprise Service Busses is vibrant and competitive.  Open source and commercial solutions are neck-and-neck in their race for dominance in the SOA space.  This week, Progress released a major upgrade to it's ESB solution.  DZone interviewed Progress' integration infrastructure marketing manager, Jonathan Daly, about the release of Sonic ESB 8.0.  New features include tight REST integration and semantic data transformation.  Sonic also features an open development model through annotated POJOs.  It runs in a JVM with no app server required.

DZone:  What new features are in this 8.0 release?

Jonathan Daly:  Progress Sonic 8.0 brings to bear the power and flexibility of an open services and integration standards development model with unmatched dynamic multi-site operations management and deployment capabilities backed by the industry’s only true, 100% up-time messaging infrastructure.  It’s fully integrated end-to-end management and semantic data transformation support embraces the services, information and operational components of heterogeneous enterprise IT environments to rationalize and coordinate business integration.

DZone:  Could you go into more detail about Sonic 8.0's REST integration?  How does it compare to the integrations done by other ESBs?  
 
Jonathan:  It is very tightly integrated and equal to our integration of traditional Web Services.  RESTful services, written using JAX-RS, can be hosted on the ESB.  They are centrally provisioned and managed as with any other type of service.  Invoking of externally hosted resources is also fully supported, with a variety of tooling designed to simplify that process (ESB to resource mapping, URI templates, etc).  And finally, our workflow processes can be exposed as resources – complete again with template mapping, full response code support and all the other goodness of REST. Our last release didn’t support REST – Sonic 8.0 is the first version to do that. Compared to other ESBs, we have a more complete solution with REST.  We do full management and monitoring of RESTful services, centralized management and provisioning, and all the benefits of the Sonic CAA are integrated as well.

             

DZone:  What is the Continuous Availability Architecture?

Jonathan:  Sonic Continuous Availability Architecture (CAA) is a software-based enterprise messaging solution that uses stateful replication between a pair of servers, eliminating the need for dedicated hardware, specialized fault sensing software, and mirrored/redundant disks. It significantly eases administrative load, resulting in a significantly simpler and more cost- effective approach to enterprise messaging availability.

DZone:  Tell me about your open development model?

Jonathan:  Some ESBs are: “you can get all the –illities of ESB, but you have to use our proprietary programming model”. Other ESBs are: “ you can leverage open development models and APIs, but we don’t really provide any advanced/enterprise –illities to accompany that”.  Sonic 8.0 combines both of those goals.  You program using well-known models and APIs – annotated POJOs.  Highly reusable, easy to understand, easy to modify.  No proprietary knowledge required.

DZone:  Is Sonic ESB a lightweight ESB that provides a mediation component (kind of like WSO2's ESB) or is it a more robust ESB that covers most of the functionality for the SOA?

Jonathan:  Sonic ESB is an enterprise solution for global integration.  We have a number of customers which embed Sonic into their products, so it can certainly scale from small to large, but the true benefits of Sonic are for enterprise deployments.