The new version of Zato - the open-source middleware platform and backend application server - has just been released. Release 2.0 brings dozens of interesting features building on and greatly enriching already existing capabilities.

Major features include:

• A Dockerfile to install a fully-operational cluster of 2 servers, load-balancer and web-admin in 10 minutes
• New connection types: Cloud Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift, Cassandra CQL, Solr, ElasticSearch, Odoo/OpenERP, SMTP and IMAP
• Redis-based REST publish/subscribe
• REST services, channels, outgoing connections and a helper JSON adapter
• HTTP GUI Audit Log for requests and responses
• Asynchronous integration patterns: fan-out/fan-in, parallel execution and invoke/retry
• SQL and OpenStack Swift notifications
• New security mechanisms: RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), SSL/TLS, OAuth, API Keys, XPath-based, NTLM, Amazon AWS
• Re-usable JSON Pointer and XPath expressions
• New Suds-based SOAP connections
• Redis HA with Sentinels
• Distributed locks
• Framework for API testing (zato-apitest - API Testing for Humans)
• rc.d scripts and systemd integration
• New SimpleIO data types: CSV, Dict, Float, List, ListOfDicts, Opaque
• HTML responses with Django templates
• Bash completion

The changelog lists all the updates that are in addition to what Zato has had since the initial release: clustering, scheduling, hot-deployment, GUI, CLI, statistics, Plain HTTP, SOAP, AMQP, FTP(S), JMS WebSphere MQ, ZeroMQ and more.

Check out the no-nonsense introduction to ESB/SOA for an introduction to the philosophy behind the project and just have a look at the following sample screenshots depicting but a small part of the platform in action: