Progress Software announced the availability of Progress Sonic ESB 7.6, its messaging-based enterprise service bus (ESB). This release offers greater productivity for developers and for managing a service oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure across heterogeneous environments.

The Progress Sonic ESB offers enterprises an alternative to centralized and monolithic middleware stacks by providing enterprises with the ability to integrate new and existing business services across their organizational boundaries, as well as connect to remote sites with low latency, high reliability and continuous availability.

Sonic ESB 7.6 allows developers to create complex service orchestrations from the ‘top down’ through ‘drag and drop’ functionality, and iterative development processes. In addition, it features embedded prototype services that allow developers to build and test services without developing them fully. Also, this release includes the addition of new process templates, which enable developers to capture their own best practices and repeat or share them for reuse.

Sonic ESB 7.6 also includes the Sonic Workbench, which is an Eclipse-based SOA graphical toolset that can be used to model, configure, test and deploy processes and services. Additionally, these graphical tools make it easy to specify configuration and deployment details that support an intuitive ‘top-down’ approach to a SOA development lifecycle.

Tutorials, available in print and video format, provide developers with best practice scenarios that help them create new services. For example, included in the tutorial are two popular use-case scenarios: ‘batch to real time’ and ’remote information access’ services. These tutorials will help developers, who are new to SOA and ESB technologies, to quickly become productive.

In Gartner’s ‘Hype Cycle for Application Infrastructure Middleware, Platforms and Architecture 2007’, analysts Roy Schulte, Jess Thompson and Kimihikio Iijima wrote: “The SOA and integration market is dynamic, with a relatively high rate of mergers and acquisitions. Therefore, companies buying an ESB product or another SOA middleware infrastructure product that contains an ESB product should consider the product viability and vendor viability, as well as the ease of development, standards compliance, quality of local support, administrative tools and feature richness.”

David White, Sonic Product Marketing Manager, Progress Software, said: “We believe the release of Sonic ESB 7.6 most certainly hits upon all of the requirements outlined by Gartner from its ease of use to its feature-rich functionality. In addition to its financial strength and stability needed for long-term customer and product support, Progress Software offers customers a portfolio of best-in-class SOA infrastructure products that supports their multi-vendor SOA environments.”