Iona Technologies plc. today is announcing the Orbix E2A Web Services Integration Platform—XMLBus Edition v5.4, the latest version of its visual environment for developing, deploying, integrating and managing secure Web services.
Ionas Orbix E2A—XMLBus Edition v5.4 delivers new features that enable the bridging of Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) systems to Web services, the company said. New features such as an Operation Flow Designer address problems inherent in mapping complex CORBA systems into more abstract, business-focused Web services, the company said. By making it easier to connect CORBA and Web services, Ionas Orbix E2A—XMLBus Edition v5.4 enables businesses to leverage their applications and system assets in ways that improve business efficiency, while reducing resource dependency and operational costs.
The Orbix E2A Web Services Integration Platform XMLBus Edition v5.4 will be available Sept. 30. Pricing starts at $495 per development license and $2,500 per CPU for a deployment license.
“Its become very clear to us in the last 12 months that our IT customers are very anxious to mitigate a lot of the cost, exposure and risk involved in implementing their systems,” said Dan Roedner, director of marketing at Iona. “Out of that has grown the interest in Web services, particularly behind the firewall for internal purposes.”
Examples of integration scenarios in which Iona customers have begun to deploy Web services to optimize their CORBA investments include integrating CORBA applications with other internal applications—typically based on Java 2 Enterprise Edition, mainframe or Microsoft technologies—without tampering with the stable CORBA system or incurring the expense of developing new CORBA interface code. Businesses also are exposing existing CORBA systems—and their information or functionality—to other parts of the organization, where CORBA previously had been a barrier to interoperability.
New features of the Waltham, Mass., companys Orbix E2A Web Services Integration Platform—XMLBus Edition v5.4 include CORBA data type support, including direct support for common CORBA design patterns such the Factory Model; support for Ionas Orbix 2000, Orbix 3 and ORBacus, and Borland VisiBroker CORBA technologies; and secure SSL-based dispatching of Web services to CORBA systems with propagation of security credentials.