Sonic readies fault-tolerant messaging

Sonic Software this spring plans to upgrade its SonicMQ message queuing software with fault tolerance and will spruce up its ESB (enterprise service bus) offering as well.

SonicMQ is an enterprise message server for business communications, serving as transactional middleware. Version 6.0 of the product ships on April 9.

“The major new feature in 6.0 of MQ is fault tolerance,” said Gordon Van Huizen, Sonic chief technology officer, in an interview on Tuesday.

“We’ll be labeling it, ‘continuous availability,’” Van Huizen said.

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, according to Van Huizen.

“Nobody is maintaining full state for the message broker between sessions except us,” Van Huizen said.

“What this offers is continuous availability to a broader set of customers,” and is easier to configure than previous messaging systems, Van Huizen emphasized.

Within a few weeks after the release of SonicMQ 6.0, Sonic plans to release version 5.5 of its Sonic ESB product, which features SonicMQ and attendant fault-tolerant features, Van Huizen said. Sonic ESB is described by the company as an enterprise service bus for application integration. It includes a service-oriented architecture, messaging, Web services and XML, and a distributed deployment infrastructure.

Citing one user example, Van Huizen said Sonic ESB is being deployed in a chain of 1,800 stores for inventory management. “The ESB gives way to create a common configuration that would be present in each of the stores,” he said.

Looking ahead, Sonic plans to 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 currently before the Java Community Process. Currently the subject of JSR (Java Specification Request) 208, Java Business Integration would provide a standardized method to configure, deploy, and invoke loosely coupled services in a J2EE environment, Van Huizen said.  

“We will trend our service container (toward) supporting this standard,” said Van Huizen, adding he expects JSR 208 to be finalized 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.