Tibco Software on Monday released its latest middleware platform for customers deploying and managing a service-oriented architecture (SOA)
ActiveMatrix 2.0 provides expanded integration, governance and application development capabilities that allows companies to build and manage SOA applications and services supporting Java, .Net and service mediation. It also lets users create applications incorporating services written and developed on multiple programming languages.
ActiveMatrix 1.0 was first released in December 2006.
“The biggest lesson learned from customers using ActiveMatrix 1.0 is that SOA is not a magic bullet,” Matt Quinn, Tibco’s vice president of product strategy, said in an interview with InternetNews.com. “People have to spend a lot of time thinking about governance and deployment aspects of an SOA project.
“The first version of Active Matrix was a raw platform,” he said. “This time, we needed to make sure we constrained the solution more in a way that customers wanted so they don’t shoot themselves in the foot, so to speak.”
Active Matrix 2.0 includes its BusinessWorks and Service Grid components for integration and assembling services, respectively. New is the ActiveMatrix Service Bus for quickly adding new services and implementing content and context-based routing. Also, developers and architects can manage all these services in a common Eclipse-based environment.
[cob:Related_Articles]”We originally underestimated the size of some of the deployments customers were doing,” Quinn said. “Some are doing hundreds of services a month. The ESB rapidly on-boards hundreds or thousands of services and works with the Service Grid and the integration technology of BusinessWorks.”
The ActiveMatrix 2.0 platform replaces much of the technical coding involved in service creation and deployment with configuration and gives architects and developers a common environment that simplifies development, deployment and management of services. Built-in SOA governance and management capabilities lets administrators oversee all these disparate services from a single console, the company said.
ActiveMatrix 2.0 can be purchased separately or as part of three tiered packages that include: The SOA Starter Bundle, which includes the ActiveMatrix Service Bus and ActiveMatrix Policy Manager; The Integration Bundle, which offers the Service Bus, BusinessWorks and Tibco adapters; and the Composite Application Bundle, which comes with the Service Bus, BusinessWorks and the Service Grid.
“The platform is more about enabling people to choose various technologies and reduce the costs of those choices rather than providing another language or API to build services,” Quinn said.
ActiveMatrix 2.0 also expands support for the Service Component Architecture (SCA) specification to improve interoperability between services and applications developed on disparate software platforms.
