Choreology releases Cohesions 3.0

WEB SERVICE/JAVA TRANSACTIONS SOFTWARE TO GO OPEN SOURCE

Contact: Alastair Green
Choreology Ltd.
+44 795 841 2107
alastair.green@choreology.com
www.choreology.com

October 20, 2005, London – Choreology Ltd today released a major new version of its distributed Business Transaction Management software, Cohesions 3.0. It also announced its intention to make the Java software available as open source.

Previous Cohesions releases offered composite application and web service business activity coordination (including user-written participants and selective outcome management), based on XML protocols such as WS-Transactions and BTP.

The new release adds atomic transaction support including JTA, local and distributed XA resource managers, and Jini transactions. The product can also be used as an industrial-grade JTA transaction manager with the JBoss application server.

About Cohesions 3.0

Cohesions 3.0 is a sophisticated and flexible Java product for managing distributed recoverable transactions. There are several significant new features. Besides the support for user-written participants and SOA/Web-Service transactions already present in previous versions (based on XML distributed coordination protocols such as OASIS BTP and WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity), this new release includes full support for the Java Transaction API (JTA), including the ability for Cohesions 3.0 to be used as a highly robust replacement for the JBoss transaction manager.

Several popular databases and messaging products have been tested as XA resource
managers with this release. These XA resource managers can either be enlisted as local JTA resources, or can be enrolled as remote resources in a distributed Cohesions transaction tree.

The addition of JTA/XA support means that Cohesions business transactions can now manage zero-phase, one-phase and two-phase resources within a single distributed transaction. Cohesions transactions can be imported into and exported from the J2EE/JTA environment, allowing transactions to concurrently span web service clients and servers, J2EE servlets and beans, and MOM client and listener programs.

In addition, Cohesions 3.0 also provides a powerful implementation of Jini transactions, simplifying the process of writing reliable, recoverable Jini transaction participants. Details of how Jini transactions are being used in a transactional Grid environment by Paremus Ltd are available at http://www.choreology.com/news/press2005/paremuscohesions.htm.

The Cohesions 3.0 release incorporates the lessons and requirements of several
customer interactions and pilots (conducted with end-user companies and in collaboration with a number of ISVs). The release is the culmination of over four years of research and development, and reflects investment of over $10m in the engineering process. The product supports features that are useful in conjunction with allied technologies such as Business Process Management (BPM) engines, MOM/ESB, and data integration. It is a key tool for the construction of reliable composite applications in an SOA/WS architecture.

Built on a single, unified-architecture core, Cohesions 3.0 uses plugins and API personalities to allow coordination of transactions in distributed environments that use diverse transports and messaging paradigms such as SOAP and JMS. Programmers can select standard APIs, while exploiting additional business transaction flexibility with a powerful proprietary API that foreshadows and supersets the extended transaction management features that are targeted by the forthcoming Java API for XML Transactions (JSR156).

More details on the product feature set and its architecture and strategic directions are available at http://www.choreology.com/downloads/Cohesions.3.0.Data.Sheet.pdf and at http://www.choreology.com/downloads/Choreology.Product.Strategy.and.Integrations.pdf

The decision to make Cohesions open source

The release of Cohesions 3.0 represents a turning point in the Choreology project, which began in 2001.

The process of standardization of the key web service standards WS-Coordination,
WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity has been agonizingly slow. The
unwillingness hitherto of major companies such as IBM, Microsoft, BEA and Oracle
to work towards standards convergence in the area of extended XML-based interoperable transaction protocols has stalled market demand for business transaction management software, by sowing doubt in the ability of the industry to come up with an answer to the problems of coordination in long-running business processes.

The announcement (http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis_news_10_12_05.php) of the
formation of the OASIS WS Transactions Technical Committee, with the participation and support of a wide range of companies including all the major players in the transactions space is a very welcome step which will likely change the commercial environment in this area – over time.

The staff of Choreology Ltd have often contributed the most advanced thinking in this arena in several standards bodies, and have produced a product that is more powerful, business-natural and easy to use than any previous distributed transaction software. At the same time, the company has not been able to build a successful commercial venture using the classic proprietary software model, and its current resources and level of business are not sufficient to continue in the same vein.

In the light of these developments, Choreology Ltd has decided to make the Cohesions 3.0 product available as open source.

Choreology seeks partners and sponsors for OSS initiative

Choreology Ltd is seeking partners and sponsors with an interest in the development of this core capability, to help create a community and a framework that will allow Cohesions to develop further, and become much more widely adopted.

Interesting and important work is needed to upgrade the current "research and analysis" implementation of WS-C, WS-AT and WS-BA 2002 to full support for the latest standardized specifications as they emerge over the next year from the OASIS WS-TX process, and also to productize support for JAXTX (JSR156) when it is finalized. A key related goal is the addition of security features, which will be required to implement key optional elements of the WS-TX specs.

In addition much useful work remains to be done to fully integrate distributed business transactions as a key component of business process management engines. The fusion of BPM and BTM promises to fulfil the potential of WS-BPEL – a language which poses the need and possibility of distributed, recoverable long-running transactions, but not does not fully answer the requirement. The emergence of open-source BPM engines from companies and communities such as Active Endpoints and JBoss, and the open-source availability of Cohesions will enable BPM/BTM integration to happen at a pace dictated by user needs, and not by the glacial product plans of software platform vendors like IBM, BEA and Oracle. Choreology already has detailed designs for such an integration, based on exploratory proposals to BPM vendors over the last two years.

Business and licensing models

Alastair Green, Choreology Ltd’s CEO and CTO, commented "We are considering the
models and licensing approaches that will be most appropriate for a transition to open source. We plan to go open source in very short order. In the interim, the Cohesions 3.0 binary release will be made available to end-users on a zero-fee licence basis. We are very open to proposals for joint work or involvement in existing OSS communities or projects. We believe that the software we have created is much more functional than existing open source transactions suites or components, and should be very useful to many developers and other software companies. We hope that collaborative work with a wider community can push forward the practical adoption of business transaction management software as a key tool in computing infrastructure."

Anyone interested in using the software and contributing to an open-source community based on the initial Cohesions 3.0 code base is encouraged to contact the company at oss@choreology.com.

The free-to-use 3.0 release complete with installers for several platforms and
full documentation can be downloaded at
http://www.choreology.com/downloads/download_cohesions.htm.

Please contact sales@choreology.com to discuss support, training and consultancy
services.

ENDS