Iona’s chief scientist Sean Baker confirmed the plans, and said that Artix 3.0 takes the ESB concept to a new level by enabling the bus to dynamically choose between the most suitable transport mechanism at time of deployment: Whether it’s J2EE, .Net, Tibco, MQ, CICS, Corba, these things have all got to work together, he said. Artix is an extensible ESB, because it can integrate all of these, and on top of that it can do it dynamically. It helps all the different kinds of middleware to work together.
Baker said that unlike other ESB’s that constrain integration projects to single or limited transports and payloads – Java Message Service (JMS) only, for example – Artix service-enables existing systems by extending their endpoints with targeted plug-ins. Artix plug-ins can support virtually any protocol, transport, data model, security standard, and development platform, he claimed. Hot deployment capabilities allow new plug-ins to be deployed in live systems without downtime of mission-critical applications.
Other enhancements to version 3.0 include extended platform coverage to include the popular Eclipse and Visual Studio development platforms. Artix integration with these IDEs lets developers use familiar tools to build enterprise service oriented architectures (SOAs), Baker said.
Artix 3.0 also includes expanded application platform support for Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Plain Old Java Objects (POJO) and Java servlets, as well as native C++ containers. Artix enables companies to bring mainframe assets into their Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) through features such as Web Services Description Language (WSDL) first development for PL/1 and Cobol, WSDL generation from BMS screen mapsets and enhanced tooling to support WSDL first command line utilities.
According to Baker, the company has also made big improvements to Artix’s scalability for 3.0 so it is suited to the most demanding environments. New enterprise quality of service (QoS) features, meanwhile, include X509 certification authentication, active/active client fail over, integration with IBM Tivoli and Computer Associates’ CA-WSDM, 2PC transaction support, WS-Atomic Transaction support, and universal description, discovery and integration (UDDI) support.
Iona’s bread and butter has historically been Orbix, its Corba integration platform. With the release of Artix 3.0 Baker said the company will add support for the first generation Orbix 3 product – it already supported the most recent Orbix 6. But he insisted that Iona is winning new customers with Artix, rather than only managing to sell it into its Orbix customer base: There’s a good mix of existing new and customers choosing Artix, he said.
In the ESB space competition comes from the likes of Sonic Software, SeeBeyond, Cape Clear and Fiorano Software. Iona’s customers include AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth, Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom, Hong Kong Telecom, NTT, Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch, Winterthur Insurance, Zurich Insurance and Boeing. It is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with US headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts.
