Cape Clear ESB 7.5

Both Progress Sonic and Cape Clear have eased installation with automation. Cape Clear's core server components and IDE installed autonomously with only minor tweaks. Cape Clear also installed JBoss to serve as the default app server. Progress Sonic includes its XML Server and Database Service out of the box.

Cape Clear bundles its server (ESB and BPEL orchestration engine) and Cape Clear Studio (graphical IDE and debugger) in its development environment, providing a good set of wizards and editors to get your developers productive. All of the expected tools are there: WSDL, XSLT (XSL Transformation), Java client stubs, and more.

By far, the biggest productivity boon comes by way of Cape Clear's new SOA Assembly framework. Where BPEL commands state-management and recovery over long-running processes, Assembly takes a lighter-weight approach, piping simple interfaces into short-lived, try-or-die scenarios. But, whereas BPEL is transport independent, assemblies are more closely tied to the transport, although they don't require SOAP and add support for REST-style calls.

In my testing, the Assembly Editor made rapid work of stringing together transforms and transports (including REST, s/FTP, e-mail, JMS (Java Message Service), outbound XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), and RSS), along with security and load balancing, from a pallet of activities. The editor also provides hooks to take advantage of the new multichannel features, with only minor declarative tinkering required. Assembly configuration files (XML) get packaged and deployed as Spring-based Java Beans into the runtime.

The Assembly Editor further streamlines development with rapid orchestration prototyping. Hopefully, as standards continue to mature, the company will offer an eventual migration path for portability.

Cape Clear has extended its BPEL as well. A new Flow activity has been added for parallel processing, Partner Link handling has been made easier, and a redesign of copy assignment has improved variable manipulation. The ability to add annotations to diagrams is likewise a nice move.

Debugging is pretty good, facilitated by a TCP/IP monitor, a Web service browser (to view running services), and fresh support for JMS and WS-Security. The data transformation tools, although decent, would benefit from an upgrade, as would the monitoring and management tools, although they're fine for sifting and sorting errant processes from log files.

One nice addition: Administrators can now hand-tweak a stalled process and replay failed activities during recovery rather than simply kick the process to the curb.

Cape Clear can be commended for the extra effort spent on bolstering support materials. Tutorials and samples in Studio help developers get going with the Eclipse IDE, with BPEL, and with services architectures in general. Although the tutorials are general, they stand out in contrast to the less-developed materials of Sonic Workbench.

In all, developer productivity, runtime performance, and transactional reliability all benefit from additions to this rev of the Cape Clear ESB. What's more, Cape Clear continues to deliver one of the easiest-to-use SOA platforms on the market today.

Progress Sonic ESB Product Family 7.5

Progress Sonic's ESB suite has made impressive strides since I last visited the product. In addition to seeing the light of BPEL and adopting WS-ReliableMessaging, the company has extended an olive branch to developers by dumping the old Workbench. The new IDE greatly simplifies configuring, testing, and deploying processes and services, and it helps to mask a good deal of the complex SonicMQ underpinnings of the ESB.

The new dev environment, like that of Cape Clear, consists of pallets of activities, transports, routing options, etc. that I could drag and drop onto the canvas. I found process validation, policy creation wizards, WS-I (Web Services Inspection) validation tools, and an updated XPath mapping tool (much more useable than its precursor in Version 6) all went a long way to improving this developer's experience.