On the usability side, Sybase has retooled its EAI user interface. The result is a more intuitive development experience, combined with a streamlined management console that showed us everything we needed without gumming the works with extras. Sybase's use of the open-source Eclipse editor to implement the interface let the company concentrate on the important work of EAI instead of reinventing a UI. We are happy to report that this is a growing trend in the EAI market.

Orchestrator's BPM designer, which is based on the Eclipse editor, was excellent. Autodetection of UDDI Web services is a useful feature, and database endpoint creation was no more difficult than that of competitors.

More EAI Stats click to enlarge

Just a word or two about autodetection: UDDI has not taken off yet, but we do see a place for it short-term with corporate directories behind the firewall.

Orchestrator makes creating objects defined in your corporate UDDI directory as easy as, "Point at the directory and say: 'Discover Web services!'" If you use this feature correctly, you might just reap some of that reuse that's been touted since the early days of SmallTalk. Using the designer as Orchestrator's management interface is a possible negative, but we found that completely separating the views minimized the hassle.

Sybase gave us a choice of JMS, MQ or files as transport mechanisms, meaning that we could work with our existing corporate infrastructure. The ability to query a UDDI server to define a Web service as an endpoint for an EAI service stands far above the competition at this time. Allowing us to retrieve interface information from a file or URL meant we were not restricted to Web services that were published in a directory.

EAI Suite Features click to enlarge

Orchestrator also let us read WSDL (Web Services Description Language) from the file system or from the URL at which the Web service is deployed. We had a little trouble getting schemas/endpoints/operations to build on one another--operations repeatedly failed to map to the database correctly--but this is likely a learning curve issue.

Orchestrator's autogeneration of WSDL for EAI "services" is unmatched by any product we tested. Sybase has laid out the interface so services are already grouped under a "services" tab in the project view. Very intuitive if you're thinking Web services, and it also fits EAI nicely.

Orchestrator's mapping functionality was sound, allowing us to map from the output of a Web service in the same manner as mapping from the columns in a database. Both use XML to store the interface definition, meaning that we could look at the generated interfaces easily if there were translation problems.

Finally, Sybase offers "viewlets" free on the Web. These are a collection of tutorials done in Flash that walk you through each step of the integration process and give you a leg up on that learning curve. A small thing, perhaps, but indicative of the quality of this product.

Integration Orchestrator 4.0, $25,000 per CPU, $12,500 per CPU for standby license, $7,500 per CPU for development and testing license (from one to four CPUs), $75,000 as tested. Sybase, (925) 236-5000, (800) 8-SYBASE. www.sybase.com