Neuron ESB 3.5 introduces Long Running Workflow capabilities!

Neuron ESB 3.5 introduces several new features and enhancements, most significant of which is long running, fault tolerant Workflow. Neuron ESB 3.5 now ships with Workflow capabilities that allow companies to design fault tolerant, business resilient workflows to automate critical processes that may span hours, days, weeks or months and cross inter- or intra-company domains. Neuron ESB’s Workflow offering is built upon Microsoft .NET Workflow Foundation 4.5, overlaying it with tools, infrastructure, a hosting environment and services necessary to deliver enterprise-level performance and scalability on the Microsoft .NET platform.

Previous versions of Neuron ESB offered business process capabilities through a graphical, user-friendly Business Process designer and runtime environment. The Business Process engine targeted real-time requirements where performance, agility and time to market were driving factors. This was often used in low latency environments such as request/response type of messaging to provide either simple VETO or, more complex Scatter–Gather and Service Composition/Orchestration Patterns. Service Composition and Orchestration is commonly used to expose a discrete set of services within an organization as higher level business services.

For example, a Business Process used to execute purchase orders may “orchestrate” the execution of several existing services in the organization and/or cloud to retrieve the information needed or update necessary systems. The results of which may need to be evaluated, enriched and/or aggregated and returned as the final response. Some of these activities may be executed asynchronously or even in parallel. Collectively, these activities and services represent a higher level Order Processing Service, where innovation is created by “composing” existing services into new business capabilities.

In addition to Service Composition/Orchestration, many organizations use the Neuron ESB Business Process engine to build fairly complex business processing scenarios. However, where the Business Process engine excelled in the areas of performance, functionality and ease of use, it lacked certain features such as real time activity tracking, fault tolerance, correlation of long running messages as well as “out of the box” compensation (commonly referred to as “saga” or “long running transactions”).

Neuron ESB 3.5 Workflow adds all these features and more, allowing businesses to automate and manage processes that span cloud, partner, system and organizational boundaries. When critical failures occur in the process or the underlying hardware, workflows can resume where they left off in the Neuron ESB hosting environment. Neuron ESB 3.5 provides a clustered hosting environment (called “Availability Groups”), that load balances the execution of workflows across multiple servers in dedicated/isolated host processes. This same clustered hosting environment allows failed workflows to automatically rollover onto available servers and start where they left off, providing both resiliency and reliability for mission critical functions.

Neuron ESB 3.5 provides a number of new features and enhancements that make using, managing and interacting with Service and Adapter endpoints easier and faster. Some of these include:

• Neuron ESB Workflow Environment
• Composition using Adapter and Service Endpoints
• WS-Discovery enabled runtime, parties and endpoints
• REST and WMI enabled Endpoint Health Monitoring
• NetSuite and Dynamics CRM 2013 Online
• Neuron ESB Explorer User Experience (UX) improvements
• Neuron ESB Database Changes
• Log4Net Neuron ESB Provider

All the changes included in the 3.5 release can be found in the Neuron ESB Change Log which gets installed with Neuron ESB. Users can download the latest Neuron ESB release from the Neuron ESB web site download page.