Choreology announces Cohesions 3.0

Coordinating distributed applications across BPM,
SOA, Web Services, MOM, ESB

Contact: Katy Birch
Choreology Ltd.
+44 (0)870 739 0056
katy.birch@choreology.com
www.choreology.com

March 21, 2005, London: Choreology Ltd, a pioneer of Business Transaction Management (BTM) software, has announced the availability of the Early Adopter version of Cohesions 3.0 which includes a number of major new features. Choreology plans to release Cohesions 3.0 for General Availability later this year.

Choreology’s BTM software is revolutionizing the management of business interactions between independent parties, accelerating business integration projects by providing levels of application and service coordination not previously available.

Choreology’s software enables the transactional composition of resources across heterogeneous technical platforms. This allows the orchestration of transactions between controlling and participating applications or services. By leveraging Cohesions, applications or services based on existing technologies - including J2EE, Web Services and legacy infrastructure and those that embrace new paradigms such as Service Oriented Architectures - can be coordinated together to provide reliable outcomes to business processes between multiple parties. This includes support for both short-lived and long-running transactions.

Cohesions 3.0 can be deployed to support:

• Composition and orchestration of transactional services for Service Oriented Architectures and Web Services
• Integration with J2EE JTA transaction environments and XA resource managers
• Business transactions across heterogeneous technical environments (heterogeneous operating systems, containers, databases and transport resources)
• Transactions for Business Process Management software including support for distributed long-running transactions in BPEL-based business processes

Key features for the Cohesions 3.0 GA release include:

• Full JDBC database support, now including Oracle 9i & 10g, IBM DB2, SQL/Server 2000 and MySQL
• Support for coordination and recovery of XA resources encompassing all popular databases and message queues
• Integration with major J2EE application servers and Web Services stacks
• Interoperability with major J2EE application server JTA implementations and introduction of the new Choreology JTA for JBoss 3.2 and 4.0 environments or for standalone usage
• Support for application coordination across heterogeneous technical environments
• Support for short- and long-running transactions
• Automated application or service recovery
• Support for Sun Solaris 2.9, 2.10, Red Hat Linux AS/ES 2.1 and 3.0, SuSE Linux ES 9.1, IBM AIX 5.2, 5.3, HP-UX 11.11, 11.23 and Microsoft Windows 2000, XP and server 2003 platforms
• Support for JMS messaging, including IBM WebSphereMQ, BEA MessageQ, TIBCO EMS 4.1 and SonicMQ 6.0
• Support for BTP 1.0, WS-Coordination and WS-AtomicTransaction 2004 and WS-BusinessActivity 2002

The Cohesions roadmap plans further compliance with key transaction standards, namely OASIS BTP 1.1 and the 2004 version of
WS-BusinessActivity.

As well as providing an essential component of existing integration projects, Choreology has identified four main areas in which BTM software is likely to emerge as a key enabling technology:

1. Business Process Management (BPM)

Although the OASIS WS-BPEL specification does not specify how distributed services and sub-processes will be coordinated by BPEL’s compensatable scopes, nevertheless it is clear that major BPEL proponents plan to utilize distributed coordination protocols like WS-BA for this purpose. Unfortunately, BPEL only recognizes a limited and problematic form of Business Transaction Management (compensation management). Choreology is therefore seeing interest from ISVs in matching and exceeding the business transaction capabilities of the BPM offerings from the major platform vendors, by implementing the full flexibility of distributed business transactions in conjunction with recoverable BPM execution engines.

2. Service-Oriented Architectures ( SOA)

The promise of service orientation – that heterogeneous, distributed operations can be composed at will by consuming applications – cannot be achieved without cross-service integrity. Whether services are accessed via SOAP, RMI or a MOM, they cannot be reliably composed without transactions. Flexible, selective-outcome business transactions are required to ensure that the compositions available are not too rigid or too brittle for typical application integrations.

3. Data integration

Whether it is extract-transform-load (ETL), reliable-and-known data propagation, or consistent data aggregation, data integration is a field where Choreology’s distributed, single-architecture transaction product is attracting interest. Current products either use localized transactions (in an inherently distributed process), or can only manage very simple, all-or-nothing combinations, when more complex transactions, including sub-transaction behaviour, are needed.

4. MOM-centric application integration

MOM enables, but MOM also destroys. The use of asynchronous messaging can usefully decouple providers from consumers. It can also engender painful divorces, where the relationships and meanings of natural business transaction structures are lost or degraded. Related activities become disconnected, synchronization points are ignored (creating unnecessary processing failures and breaks), and composite outcomes and orderings are difficult to track and accomplish. Choreology is seeing repeated interest in enhancing MOM-centric integration frameworks with BTM capability.

Choreology expects these technology areas to increasingly rely upon BTM software, both embedded within other products, and used directly by those creating and integrating applications.

About Choreology

Choreology plays a defining role in the emerging category of Business Transaction Management software. Founded in January 2001 by a group of specialists in the field of distributed transaction management, the company’s senior staff average 20 years in the IT industry. They have commercial, technical and managerial experience with transactional products and solutions, working with both vendors and end customers, across financial services, insurance, telecommunications and supply chain management. Choreology is a privately held, UK-based company headquartered in London.

Choreology’s Business Transaction Management software is available for end user deployments and ISV integration, solving a wide range of integration issues – delivering fully flexible and recoverable business transactions for business process management execution engines; supporting the reliable composition of applications across service-oriented architectures; ensuring consistency for data integration projects; enhancing MOM integration frameworks with business transaction management capability.

For further information please visit http://www.choreology.com

ENDS