Sonic Software - Actional in Seattle

I went up to Seattle today to listen to Sonic Software and Actional (Progress/Sonic recently acquired Actional) talk about SOA/Event Driven Architecture best practices and maturity models and such.

I had to get up at the butt-crack of dawn to get there in time. It is a 3 hour drive from Portland to Seattle - the meeting started at 8:30. Not fun. So early that I forgot my belt. Good thing is I look particularly handsome without a belt unlike most people.

I also participated in a forum talking about lessons learned and SOA challenges. It was interesting to hear other points of view, etc.

My company uses SonicMQ as our JMS provider. One of the better ones out there. Coolest thing they do is "shared subscriptions". Basically lets you scale a subscription horizontally. You just use their clever little shared subscription syntax when you register the subscription. Then, multiple connections on N hosts are considered one logical entity and they shared the burden of processing the messages for that entity. Basically, you get the benefit of competing consumers on the Topic. It is just like it is a Queue, but you can have other shared subscriptions and normal subscriptions listening to the same topic at the same time.

I didn't know much about Actional until recently. I had lunch with Sonic's new CTO, Dan Foody and some other Sonic guys. Dan was the CTO at Actional. They have some cool products. Using their products, you can monitor a SOA/EDA deployment end to end. It traces transactions through all your services. Apparently they do this by some byte code magic where they listen at all the appropriate times. They append headers to HTTP/XML requests, JMS, CORBA, RMI, etc. that allows them to trace the logical transaction where it goes on the SOA/EDA. Wicked cool.

We do this by hand currently - as event bounce around, we scribble which hosts/Destinations they were routed on, which services processed them, etc to a "event history" message property. This information is really useful when events end up on error queues etc. Also nice for debugging and bringing new developers up to speed on the system. Self documenting and what not. We just do this for JMS though ... we don't have the same visibility for HTTP based services. Anyway, the Actional stuff seems pretty useful. I want to give it a spin.

Update 17-JUL-06 - Now that it is possible to determine my employer by reviewing my blog posts, I must follow my employer's blog policy.

This is not an endorsement by Liberty Mutual, but my personal view. Vendors are NOT free to quote with attribution.