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Iona Technologies has announced the availability of Artix 4.0, the latest version of the companys ESB.
Dublin, Ireland-based Iona announced Artix 4.0 on April 3, claiming that the new Enterprise Service Bus improves customers ability to adopt service-oriented architectures into their IT environment.
New enhancements in Artix include improved service orchestration, reliable messaging, JMS (Java Message Service) support, new data services and improvements to the products mainframe support.
Artix 4.0 features BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)-based orchestration to allow customers to coordinate interactions across a distributed set of services in mission-critical, heterogeneous environments, said Eric Newcomer, chief technology officer at Iona.
In addition, Artix 4.0 supports WS-RM (WS-ReliableMessaging), delivering standards-based reliable messaging using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) messages over HTTP.
The new version of Artix also ships with support for JMS as a standard messaging API, the company said.
Artix 4.0 adds new data services capabilities, and data resources can be manipulated and queries changed via the Artix Eclipse-based development environment, the company said.
Iona also delivered enhancements to the products support for IBM z/OS mainframe environments to better enable mainframe assets to be deployed in SOA environments.
“Based on our Artix 4.0 beta experience, it is clear that Iona has added new features that can be adopted in a flexible manner,” said Brian Hanrahan, Business Development Director, Sentenial, in a statement.
“We are particularly pleased with the data services capabilities in Artix 4.0 as this allows us to query and update databases using any message protocol within our customer environments. The Eclipse UI also allows for much quicker and easier data manipulation.”
In his blog April 3, Ionas Newcomer said: “Artix 4 includes: Orchestration – deployable at the endpoint or intermediary – includes Artix multi protocol support; WS-RM – reliable messaging for HTTP; Data services – creating services from data sources; WS-Addressing support along with WS-Coordination and WS-AtomicTransactions.
“Because Artix already supports WS-Security, Artix has just become the first commercial product to support secure, reliable, transacted Web services.”
Moreover, Newcomers blog said: “Artix 4 also is priced differently than previous versions of Artix. Theres one price for the core, and a la carte prices for plug-ins and protocols, so you can avoid a big up-front investment in software.”
Pricing for the Artix runtime is $10,000 per CPU, the company said.
Additional Artix plug-ins begin at $2,500 per CPU and scale to $10,000 per CPU depending on the functionality delivered.
In other SOA-related news, Mercury Interactive announced a new version of Mercury Quality Center, a strategic part of Mercury BTO Enterprise.
Mercury BTO Enterprise is part of Mercurys BTO (business technology optimization) software strategy.
Mercury Quality Center 9.0 automates the functional testing of service-based applications, including SOAs and Web services with new capabilities in Mercury QuickTest Professional, the company said.
The new Mercury product also helps to manage the impact of changes to SAP AG applications with new capabilities in Mercury TestDirector and Mercury Business Process Testing, the company said.
And Mercury Quality Center 9.0 enables collaboration between developers and quality assurance staff on software-defect and quality initiatives through a new integration into Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System, Mercury officials said.