Sonic Software, a provider of the enterprise service bus (ESB), has unveiled the latest release of its Sonic ESB, the cornerstone of Sonic Software's service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure offering. The Sonic ESB 7.0 release includes a new Eclipse-based workbench that the company claims will dramatically accelerate the modeling, configuration, testing and deployment of projects across large-scale, distributed SOA environments. In addition, Sonic ESB 7.0 introduces an enterprise-grade implementation of the advanced Web services standards aimed at mission-critical SOA deployments.

The new, Eclipse-based Sonic Workbench£: 7.0 provides an integrated SOA toolset to streamline a project lifecycle with the following capabilities:

• Process Modeling—provides a visual, drag-and-drop palette and standards-based business process notation, enabling business analysts to create process flows across distributed services and more effectively collaborate with SOA architects;
  
  
• Configuration—enables SOA architects and developers to create services and implement ESB process flows across a distributed topology using point-and-click, metadata-driven configuration models, while preserving access to a drill-down, code-level view;
  
  
• Testing & Debugging—provides the ability to test and debug ESB processes on the desktop and in test environments, as well as triage and diagnose problems in live, distributed deployments. Sonic delivers the first distributed ESB Process Debugger, allowing developers to view and debug a process executing across multiple, distributed services from within the Eclipse environment. Sonic also enables visual step-through debugging of distributed process as they execute within a live deployment, without disrupting other ongoing processes;
  
  
• Deployment—reduces the risk associated with managing change in complex SOA environments by determining the dependencies of composite applications and business processes, and analyzing the impact of promoting these processes into the production environment.

According to a company release, "Sonic ESB 7.0 also provides an implementation of advanced Web services standards for secure and reliable communication between services suitable for mission-critical deployments: WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Addressing, WS-Security and WS-Policy."

Sonic ESB 7.0 will be generally available on May 1, 2006.