Sonic SOA Offering Balances Flexibility, Maturity

Jeff Cooper has more than 25 years of experience as a CIO, CTO and chief architect. He was the founder of J. T. Cooper LLC, a Dallas-based consulting firm specializing in enterprise architecture and program management. He can be reached at [email protected].

Since Sonic Software first introduced the term “ESB” in 2002, several vendors have “jumped on the bus.”

At one extreme of the spectrum are products essentially built from scratch upon relevant XML and Web service standards; at the other extreme are the latest incarnations of traditional EAI and middleware products from BEA Systems, IBM and others. In the first case, the products are less mature, offering widely varying degrees of capability in adapting commercial applications and services other than Web services as first-class citizens on the bus. In contrast, integration brokers and other EAI products tend to exhibit a hub-and-spoke architecture that is somewhat antithetical to service-oriented architecture (SOA) and typically quite costly to deploy.

Sonic ESB version 6.1 fits right in the middle. It balances a mature set of products and features with a consistent, flexible, highly scalable architecture that embraces open standards. Sonic eschews a hub-and-spoke architecture, allowing services to be fully distributed across corporate domains and geographic sites. Services can span clusters and security infrastructures to form a fully federated environment, enabling arbitrarily large deployments to be managed from a central location. The configurable service interaction model facilitates loose coupling and significantly enhances extensibility and scalability.

A domain manager is included, providing a directory for services deployed on the bus, and dynamic routing capability also is provided. Once on the bus, Web services as well as custom applications, .Net components and legacy middleware all appear as reusable services. Literally hundreds of adapters are available for J2EE, COM, .Net components, ERP systems and legacy databases.

I recently led a project that required integration with existing .Net and J2EE applications, multiple legacy databases, and rather extensive development and deployment of new services and business processes—a typical SOA project, in other words. The development team had extensive experience with .Net, Bea WebLogic, SeeBeyond and IBM WebSphere.

During this project, we ended up crafting a partnership with Sonic. One key factor was the laudable level of support the vendor provided. We took full advantage of the vendor&'s excellent self-paced training and classroom instruction offerings. Other reasons we went deeper with Sonic: the significant reduction in development time and total costs. The product licensing costs with Sonic proved to be as little as 10 percent of what we had estimated would be required with competing EAI products. From a technical perspective, we were impressed with the product&'s nearly limitless scalability, rock-solid messaging, the ease with which changes could be introduced, and the ability to manage federated services centrally.

There were a few limitations and challenges.

With complex applications, the process of effectively leveraging Sonic&'s configuration, quality-of-service and fault-tolerance features can be time-consuming and error-prone, and it requires extensive knowledge of JMS, XML/XSLT/XPath, WSDL, JavaScripts and Java.

The graphical tools provided, while adequate, likely will disappoint developers accustomed to full-featured, wizard-enabled integrated development environments. Sonic promises the availability of Eclipse plug-ins in a future release.

Product pricing, channel discounts and packaging are a bit confusing. Licensing is on either a per-CPU or per-seat basis. An upgrade to the full Sonic SOA Suite adds Sonic Orchestration Server, Sonic XML Server and Sonic Database Service to the mix. Sonic&'s SOA Suite is priced at $35,000 per CPU. Most organizations will find the rich functionality of these additional products compelling. Certainly, they make the offering from Sonic as close to an “SOA-out-of-the-box” as you can get in today&'s market.