Actional Application Development

To deliver lower IT costs, greater revenues, and business agility, service-based applications must execute business transactions successfully. Pre-production is the best time to identify and address reliability, integration, performance, and scalability issues—before they are "baked into" the software and released into the runtime environment. Actional Application Development offers the tools your pre-production teams need to resolve quality and performance issues quickly. This is achieved with:

• A collaborative platform for sharing quality-related assets, test results and policy enforcement rules.
  
  
• Fast and easy testing of performance, regression, and compliance—without a deep knowledge of XML.
  
  
• Load testing early and often during development to ensure performance and scalability later in production.

With Actional Application Development, pre-production teams enjoy better visibility, collaboration and testing to ensure there will be no surprises in the production environment. Here are even more benefits:

• Deliver well-tested services faster to QA and production, saving time, money and developer involvement later in the lifecycle.
  
  
• Increase team productivity with a collaborative approach to validation by sharing test assets throughout the service lifecycle.
  
  
• Save time by quickly understanding the behavior of services and solving XML-related problems without needing to write any code.
  
  
• Quickly diagnose and pinpoint the source of performance issues and bottlenecks before the problem becomes a costly production issue.
  
  
• Ensure performance and scalability in production by conducting load testing early and often.
  
  

Actional Application Development is a family of pre-production quality and validation tools that make it easier to deliver well-tested, scalable, and design-time policy-compliant services and applications. Key product features include:

• Flow Maps - Provide an automatic detailed snapshot of service interactions and dependencies across the transaction path without any coding.
  
  
• Load testing - Tests performance and scalability in pre-production without specialized skills, generating a report to share with the team.
  
  
• Pseudocode™ view: no XML required - Understand service behavior without writing code or knowing XML with easy to understand XML message forms.
  
  
• HP Quality Center Integration - HP Quality Center users can benefit from test assets developed in Actional—sharing test results and re-running tests.
  
  
• Design-time policy authoring and validation - Create policy and ensure that services comply to industry and corporate standards and will perform well in production.
  
  

Want to learn more?

Click here to watch byte-size demos that explore the features and functionality of Actional Team Server, which is a component of Progress® Actional® Application Development.

Actional products are built for optimal integration and data interoperability with a wide range of heterogeneous infrastructure such as applications, data sources, network devices, middleware, identity management products, and registries and repositories. Actional places great importance on supporting industry standards to make this interoperability possible.

Actional Application Development includes Actional Management Server Basic Edition and Actional Team Server. It is ideal for corporations getting started in the initial phases of  managing their end-to-end infrastructure. For enterprise-level development, as well as lifecycle management, Progress offers Actional Enterprise.

Technical requirements for Actional Management Server Basic Edition:

Server(s):

• 2 GHz processor or faster
• 2 GB (recommended)
• 836 MB disk space
  
  

Operating System(s):

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003, XP Professional (SP1, SP2 or SP3),and Vista*
• Red Hat Linux*, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 for x86
• Solaris 10 for SPARC* HP-UX 11i (PA-RISC—64 bit support available on Itanium
• IBM AIX 5.3 (RS-600)
• SUSE Linux Enterprise 9, 10
• Glassfish Application Server 2.1 (Enterprise and Open Source)
  
  * Note: The Collector is not supported under Vista, Linux, and Solaris.
  
  

Browser(s):

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or above
• Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and 3.0
  
  

Database Manager(s): 

• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008
• MySQL 4.1 and 5
• Oracle 9i, 10g, 10g Express, ll g
• Apache Derby (Embedded)
  
  

Java virtual machine:

• Sun JDK 1.1.02, 1.5.0; BEA Jrockit JVM 1.4.02, 1.5.0
  
  

Protocols and interfaces:

• Axis, SOAP, REST, POX, EJB, JMS, Servlets (HTTP), Jakarta HTTP client, ADO.Net, RMI, and JDBC
  
  

Actional agents can instrument a broad range of environments, including (but not limited to) Apache Tomcat, Oracle WebLogic Server (formerly BEA WebLogic Server), IBM WebSphere, JBoss Server, Oracle Application Server (OAS), Systinet WASP/J, Microsoft .NET framework, SAP NetWeaver, Progress® Sonic® ESB, Progress® SonicMQ®, Progress® Artix® (formerly IONA Artix), Progress® Orbix (formerly IONA Orbix), Progress® OpenEdge®, Oracle Service Bus (formerly AquaLogic Service Bus), WebMethods Integration Server, X-broker, and TIBCO.

Technical requirements for Actional Team Server:

General Requirements:

• 2 GHz processor or faster
• 2 GB memory (recommended)
• 398 MB disk space for the server
  
  
  • Requires Java JDK 1.6 (or higher). The Java Virtual Machine version that you use must support the -server option.
  • If you are using Actional Team Server with Actional Management Server, Actional Management Server must have an equal or higher version than that of Actional Team Server for the installation to work properly.
  
  
  

Operating System(s):

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 XP Professional (SP1, SP2,SP3), Vista*
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 for 86
• Solaris* 10 for SPARC
  
  Note: The Collector is not supported under Vista, Linux, and Solaris.
  
  

Browser(s):

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0, 7.0, or 8.0
• Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and 3.0
  
  

Database Manager(s):

• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008
• MySQL 4.1 and 5
• Oracle 9i, 10g, 10g Express, and 11g
• Apache Derby 10.5 (Embedded)