Progress Software this week released Sonic ESB 7.5, an update to the innovative enterprise service bus that adds a BPEL process orchestration server and integrates with Progress Actional, the company's SOA monitoring and management solution. The ESB also now integrates with Progress DataXtend Semantic Integrator (SI), a data validation and transformation engine that can be deployed as a service into the bus. Las Progress Software this week released Sonic ESB 7.5, an update to the innovative enterprise service bus that adds a BPEL process orchestration server and integrates with Progress Actional, the company’s SOA monitoring and management solution. The ESB also now integrates with Progress DataXtend Semantic Integrator (SI), a data validation and transformation engine that can be deployed as a service into the bus. Last but not least, the rev includes a number of performance tweaks. Progress reps didn’t say as much, but if you had to choose a theme for all of the enhancements, it would appear to be improved support for larger, more complex environments. Calling DataXtend SI “maybe the most interesting single piece of technology in this story,” Sonic product marketing guy Ken Schwarz said the technology offers a way to eliminate the “accidental architecture” (aka spaghetti) of multiple point-to-point transformations. According to Schwarz, DataXtend SI lets you create a common data model, which is basically the union of all the data models in your SOA. Using the Eclipse-based Sonic Workbench, you define the mappings between your endpoints and the model, and the tool generates the Java code for validation and transformation. Finally, the DataXtend service plugs into the bus, and you invoke it as a step in an Itinerary (Sonic’s mechanism for content-based message routing) or in a BPEL process. The new Sonic BPEL Server, which brings WS-BPEL 2.0 compliant service orchestration to the platform, essentially shows the old Sonic Orchestration Server the door. Sonic product manager Jaime Meritt said that “O Server” would continue to be supported, but BPEL Server would be the focus of development efforts going forward. Here again, the BPEL support is integrated into Workbench, where developers can assemble processes by dragging and dropping controls from a palette of BPEL actions. Schwarz said the company scrupulously avoided adding any language extensions. “We have a lot of secret sauce,” he added, “but it’s all hidden behind the WSDL interface… because the ability to import other people’s BPEL and the ability to transport BPEL is important.” As with Itineraries for content-based routing, Workbench allows you to debug BPEL processes that span multiple messaging brokers across a distributed environment. As Meritt showed in a WebEx demo, you can set break points in the BPEL process, or in the intelligent route, and step through local and remote processes and service states. On the Actional integration, Meritt had this to say: “We package the interceptors with the ESB and with BPEL for talking with Actional, so it’s all integrated out of the box, with zero configuration essentially.” Actional can monitor the BPEL Server, the ESB message brokers, and all service endpoints, providing a graphical view of service connections and activity and helping to pinpoint bottlenecks.Finally, Schwarz and Meritt said the 7.5 release also features these performance boosts (versus version 7.0.1) and other improvements: * A new embedded HTTP server that speeds broker to broker communications by 2x to 10x* Faster XML processing capabilities that speed Itinerary throughput (Web service invocation, XPath-based routing, and XSLT operations) by 3x to 10x * Improved directory service replication for high availability, allowing for fast and transactionally secure replication between multiple directory services * Redundant network paths between cluster participants* Finer-grained role-based access control for configuration and management, and improved auditing* Successful interoperability testing with Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation and its implementations of WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Security, WS-Policy, and WS-Addressing Technology Industry