Sonic Software will upgrade its SonicMQ message queuing
software with fault tolerance and will also spruce up its ESB
(enterprise service bus) offering.
SonicMQ is an enterprise message server for business
communications, serving as transactional middleware. Version 6.0 of
the product ships on 9 April.
"The major feature in 6.0 of MQ is fault tolerance," said Gordon
Van Huizen, Sonic chief technology officer.
Rather than relying on clustering or Raid, version 6.0 uses
"stateful replication" between servers in a cluster. The feature
ensures availability, overcoming failures that have plagued
messaging environments.
"Nobody is maintaining full state for the message broker between
sessions except us," said Van Huizen.
He added that the upgrade will offer continuous availability to
a broader set of customers, and is easier to configure than
previous messaging systems.
Within a few weeks after the release of SonicMQ 6.0, Sonic will
release version 5.5 of its Sonic ESB product, which features
SonicMQ and attendant fault-tolerant features.
Sonic ESB is an enterprise service bus for application
integration and includes a service-oriented architecture,
messaging, web services and XML and a distributed deployment
infrastructure.
Sonic will migrate from its own service interface, enabling
application communications on ESB, which the company calls a
service container, to integration technology being developed in the
Java community.
A proposal for revising Java technology entitled "Java Business
Integration" is already before the Java Community Process. The
subject of JSR (Java Specification Request) 208, Java Business
Integration would provide a standardised method to configure,
deploy, and invoke loosely coupled services in a J2EE
environment.
"We will trend our service container [toward] supporting this
standard," said Van Huizen, adding he expected JSR 208 to be
finalised by the end of this year.
BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services)
support also will be included in ESB at some point. BPEL4WS
choreographs business processes in web services environments.
Sonic also hopes to tighten links between SonicMQ and the
Microsoft .net environment, perhaps adding support for
functionality, such as, handheld device communications.
Paul Krill writes for InfoWorld