Iona Technologies plc. announced Monday a new version of its Artix enterprise service bus for mission-critical IT environments.
Artix 3.0 delivers three kinds of features that Ionas customers have been asking for, said Eric Newcomer, chief technology officer of the Dublin, Ireland, company—features that extend the ESB, provide broad platform support (from mobile to mainframe applications) and deliver enterprise quality of service.
In essence, Artix 3.0 delivers a new generation of ESB and gives developers the ability to service-enable more systems in SOAs (service-oriented architectures).
Newcomer said Artix 3.0 features both Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio development platforms to enable developers to use the tools they know to build SOAs. The product features support for J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition), POJO (plain old Java objects), Java servlets and native C++ containers, in addition to WSDL (Web Services Description Language) development for PL/1 and COBOL.
Newcomer said the Artix service enables systems by extending their endpoints with plug-ins.
“Iona has a lot of customers doing large-scale deployment with CORBA [Common Object Request Broker Architecture], and they are all talking about pursuing a high-end ESB,” Newcomer said.
And while all the major software vendors, such as IBM and Microsoft Corp., “are talking about delivering a next-generation ESB down the road, we already have a second-generation ESB,” he said.
“We also see legacy enablement where people will use the new platform in the SOA world, so were talking with all the other guys—Microsoft, IBM, etc.—to provide complementary solutions,” Newcomer said. “Wed prefer to complement rather than compete.”
Newcomer said Iona sees the opportunity around its ESB “as least as much as what we had with CORBA. We feel theres a significant opportunity for us there.”
Newcomer also said Iona has a history of providing quality of service with security, high availability, management, transaction support and directory services. Artix 3.0 features X509 certification authentication, client failover, integration with WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management), two-phase commit transaction support, WS-Atomic Transaction support and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) support.
