Worldwide Education Quarterly June 2008

Table of Contents

1. Welcome, from PSC Corporate Education Manager Michael Archdeacon
2. The evolution of Progress® Sonic™ ESB continues with V7.6, by David White
3. New course available: Managing Operational Visibility with Actional®, by Elaine Rosenberg
4. Working with Progress® Sonic™ Workbench, by Kashif Khan
5. Introducing the new Advanced Progress® SonicMQ® course, by Peter Tran

A Message from Michael Archdeacon, PSC Corporate Education Manager

Each of our newsletter editions contains articles concerning PSC products, often with an education angle to them. This edition, like much of the news from PSC these days, has a dominant theme and that is Services Oriented Architecture (SOA).

David White discusses the evolution of the original ESB in our industry, the Progress Sonic ESB, a key component of the Progress SOA portfolio. He also points to some valuable sources of relevant online support for this product. Elaine Rosenberg has written a course, Managing Operational Visibility with Actional, that teaches how to gain visibility into the service traffic in your SOA. Her article in this edition describes that training and the value of the products it supports. Kashif Khan has an article that speaks to his new course on the Progress Sonic Workbench. A course that teaches the utilization of a tool set that supports the development of service-enabled applications. Lastly, Peter Tran writes about his latest course, Advanced Progress SonicMQ. He highlights the MQ functionality he has placed in this advanced course, functionality that may be new even to current users of the product.

Whether you are using SOA now, converting to SOA now or are still exploring SOA themes, our current and rapidly evolving PSC product sets and curricula will support you every step of the way. We can provide ILT where and when you need it and we can enable your productivity with an entire library of supportive eLearning training. Remember, too, that our eLearning can be used both as start-to-finish training and as just-in-time Performance Support training.

- Michael Archdeacon

The evolution of Progress® Sonic™ ESB continues with V7.6

By David White

Progress® Sonic™ ESB is the enterprise service bus that started it all, being the first ESB introduced back in 2002. Since then, we’ve continued to innovate and enhance Sonic ESB to provide what we believe is the best back-end integration product there is. As a key part of the Progress SOA Portfolio, Sonic ESB addresses the critical requirement for distributed SOA communications, giving an unbeatable integration backbone.

With the recent release of Sonic ESB 7.6, many enhancements were made, not just to the software itself, but also to the support and educational materials that are part of the trial evaluation software.

Many of the product enhancements were to the workbench that is used to configure and deploy the enterprise service bus. The Eclipse-based Sonic Workbench is used to model, configure, test and deploy services and processes on the ESB. Its graphical tools make it easy to model business processes and subsequently specify configuration and deployment details, supporting an intuitive "top-down" approach to the SOA development lifecycle. Unique distributed debugging gives you a visual step-through debugger for distributed service orchestrations and BPEL processes.

Sonic ESB also retains some enduring strengths that have been part of the product for some time, yet remain unique in the marketplace. These include:

Continuously available integration backbone
Only Sonic ESB has an unstoppable messaging backbone that gives you continuous availability out of the box. Many customers, including Oppenheimer Funds, the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), and London’s Heathrow airport, depend on Sonic ESB to keep performing, no matter what hardware, software or network failures occur.

Deploy globally, manage from anywhere, change instantly
With Sonic ESB you can configure, update and manage your distributed SOA infrastructure from a single console located anywhere on the network. Sonic ESB customers – in retail, for example – are able to manage hundreds of remote integration points from a central location without the need to put IT support into the field.

Fits into your existing infrastructure
The Sonic ESB lightweight, zero-cost container works in a heterogeneous environment—no application servers are required or embedded. Sonic ESB customers can freely deploy into their existing infrastructure and scale with minimal hardware resources.

To promote the download and evaluation of Sonic 7.6, many new supporting documents and educational resources were also developed. These include a series of “cook-along” demonstrations, featuring Progress’s David Millman, a Principal Architect in the office of the CTO. Each short demonstration takes a hands-on approach to highlight some of the key capabilities in the Sonic Workbench and Sonic ESB. Topics being covered include getting started, building your first ESB service and process and using templates in Sonic Workbench and distributed debugging. You can access these and other resources at the Sonic Evaluation Center on PSDN by visiting: www.progress.com/sonic-eval.

Sign up for the next Sonic Cook-a-long, watch a replay of a previous Cook-a-long, or download the evaluation version of Sonic ESB by visiting: http://www.sonicsoftware.com/products/sonic_workbench/eval_downloads/index.ssp.

David White is a Senior Marketing Manager with Progress Software

New course available: Managing Operational Visibility with Actional®

By Elaine Rosenberg

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables architects and developers to define the use cases of an enterprise in terms of services. The providers of the services can be from within or outside of the enterprise. The consumers of the services need not know (or care) what platform or in what programming language the service is running. In an enterprise, the success of an organization can often depend on how well the services in the SOA meet the needs of the organization. The Actional® products help administrators understand the run-time characteristics of services in their SOA.

The newly-published course, Managing Operational Visibility with Actional, teaches you how to gain visibility into the service traffic in your SOA using either of the following Actional products:

• Actional for SOA Operations
• Actional for Continuous Service Optimization

Course overview
This course guides you through the installation and set-up of the Actional Server and Actional Agent, along with a SOA training environment you use during the course to generate and monitor a variety of service traffic scenarios.

In this course you see numerous demonstrations for using Actional to perform key configuration and monitoring tasks. In addition, the course includes many hands-on exercises (Try Its) that you perform in your live version of Actional.

The modules of this course include:

Course delivery formats
The course is available as three-day classroom training. Materials include a course book, containing lessons, a lab book featuring hands-on labs, as well as a CD with example code and lab files with solutions.

For the self-paced learner, the course also is available in our eLearning catalog which can be found at http://wbt.progress.com.

Elaine Rosenberg is a Senior Course Developer with Progress Software.

Working with Progress® Sonic™ Workbench

By Kashif Khan

The Progress Sonic ESB product family comprises Sonic ESB and a comprehensive set of related products that simplify application integration using a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Progress Sonic Workbench is one of the important products of the Sonic ESB product family.

Workbench is an integrated development environment (IDE) for application architects and developers to build service-enabled applications, create services, orchestrate business processes, and test those processes prior to deployment. This IDE is built on the Eclipse platform and provides tools that simplify the task of designing complex business solutions and improve the productivity of application development teams.

Some of the key features of Sonic Workbench, which enable application developers to easily develop Sonic applications, are:

• Supports the top-down business process modeling that allows developers to model business processes without requiring specification of the features and properties of services they invoke. Developers may subsequently "drill down" into process steps to fully specify their features and properties.
• Provides a visual environment for creating and testing of XML transformation, XPath and XQuery expressions. This enables developers to rapidly build composite applications using industry standard transformation and query languages.
• Allows application developers to create and test custom ESB services using an existing Java™ class.
• Allows real-time, visual monitoring of process messages. This enables developers to track service interaction and business process flow.
• Includes an integrated test environment that enables developers to build and test processes locally in preconfigured services containers before deploying across the network. Developers can directly define test scenarios from their applications using Workbench. This ensures faster test cycles using pre-configured test scenarios and environments.

The Introduction to the Progress Sonic Workbench Development Environment course is now available to the Progress eLearning community and covers the basic tasks performed by an application developer in Workbench.

After taking this course, students should be able to:

• Use Workbench to develop Sonic applications.
• Describe the components of the Sonic development environment.
• Create projects and artifacts using Workbench.
• Modify artifacts using Workbench editors.
• Test artifacts using scenarios.
• Manage services and containers using Workbench.

This course is available as two days of instructor-led training and as a Web-based training. For more information on Progress Web-based training courses, please visit http://wbt.progress.com

Kashif Khan is a Course Developer with Progress Software.

Introducing the new Advanced Progress® SonicMQ® course

By Peter Tran

You are an experienced SonicMQ® administrator. You have taken the SonicMQ System Administration course and have administered your SonicMQ messaging system(s) for some time. You can install the SonicMQ product, create brokers and containers, and configure routing nodes for dynamic routing. You also can configure HTTP Direct acceptors and clusters of brokers. In short, you are skilled in performing essential SonicMQ administrative tasks.

However, you might have faced more challenging issues such as how to design large-scale SonicMQ deployments, establish management security, implement high availability, monitor and manage SonicMQ entities, and tune SonicMQ for optimal performance.

To address these issues, Progress Corporate Education now offers a new course, Advanced Progress SonicMQ System Administration, based on the recently released SonicMQ V7.6. Here are the main topics covered in this course:

Designing a large-scale SonicMQ® deployment: Depending on your business model and business requirements, you may need to design your SonicMQ messaging systems for such objectives as scalability, high availability, and performance. In this topic, you examine various broker configurations and how to plan for a large scale deployment. You also learn how to use response files for custom installation and upgrades.

Managing security and auditing: SonicMQ messaging brokers are valuable enterprise resources that must be protected from unauthorized access and usage. In this topic, you learn how to establish a security layer to manage the administrators who manage user-level security. You also learn how to audit the tasks your administrators performed in order to meet accountability requirements and compliance regulations.

Implement continuous availability: SonicMQ provides the messaging backbone for mission-critical communications within the enterprise and for connecting with business partners and customers. Its Continuous Availability Architecture enables you to implement high availability at all four levels of your messaging system: client, broker, cluster, and management framework components. In this topic, you learn how to implement fault-tolerant client connections, replicated brokers, clusters of replicated brokers, and continuously available management services.

Performing runtime monitoring and management of SonicMQ® components: In a highly distributed messaging system, you must be able to centrally monitor and manage messaging entities. In this topic, you learn how to configure and monitor metrics on containers, brokers, and instances. You also learn how to monitor and manage container logs, container and component collections, and Logger component.

Tune SonicMQ® installations: Out of the box, SonicMQ is finely tuned for most installations. However, there are situations where you can tune your SonicMQ messaging system for better performance. In this topic, you explore how messages flow in your SonicMQ system, set measurable performance targets, identify performance bottlenecks, and tune your system for better performance. You also learn how to perform stress tests on your SonicMQ system using the Sonic test harness in order to determine under what conditions your system performs poorly and what you can do to enhance performance.

In summary, the new Advanced Progress SonicMQ System Administration course is designed to raise your SonicMQ skill set to a higher level. It provides you with a set of advanced tools, techniques, and guidelines to tackle more challenging administrative tasks. Along the way, it shows you not just how, what, and when to do something, but also why you need to do it.

The course is available as four-day classroom training. Materials include a course book, containing lessons and hands-on labs, as well as a CD with example code and lab files with solutions. Customers may request an instructor-led training class taught by a Progress field consultant at their own location.

The course is also available as eBook for online learning. Progress eLearning Community (PEC) subscribers can take the course at their convenience. For more information about the PEC, please visit http://wbt.progress.com

For the latest information about Progress Sonic Education, please visit http://www.sonicsoftware.com/services/education_training/index.ssp

Peter Tran is a Principal Course Developer with Progress Software.

Curriculum At-a-Glance

Progress, AppServer, WebClient, PeerDirect, Progress Dynamics, SmartObject, OpenEdge, ObjectStore, Sonic, SonicMQ, ProDataSet, Actional, SOAPstation, and WebSpeed are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one it its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Java and all Java based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks or service marks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

Copyright © 2008 Progress Software Corporation. All rights reserved.