Helping users quickly create and manage data services from unwieldy, disparate data sources

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., Oct. 6 -- Sparxent, an IT and business solutions provider for the middle market, announced today that it has delivered the next release of its comprehensive open source data integration solution, XAware 5.4, greatly enhancing users' abilities to build and deploy data services for use by business applications.

"This new version focuses on making integration tasks easier to accomplish," noted XAware Project lead, Kirstan Vandersluis. "The most significant improvements include more powerful text processing, improved access to Salesforce.com and performance enhancements. These features were largely driven by our community of over 10,000 registered XAware.org users."

Services developed using XAware typically solve the complex data access requirements of other business applications, and have found broad use across industries such as financial services, government, insurance, healthcare and telecommunications.

Sparxent's feature-rich product is delivered as an Eclipse-based plug-in and server component to make it easy for development groups to immediately begin designing and delivering data services for service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments, rich Internet applications (RIA) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. XAware 5.4 implements a number of important enhancements, including:

1. Improved design-time efficiency - Many improvements have been added to speed the design-test-deploy cycle for data services, including: text and file transformations are simplified by a new wizard; access to Salesforce.com has been greatly improved; visual indicators now show the types of sources accessed by a data service at a glance; and, an extensive library of examples is now easier to access.
2. Enhanced Rich Internet Application (RIA) Support - The new release supports JavaScript Object Notation, or JSON, as an input and output data format. JSON is a popular language-independent data format for exchanging data structures to ease building of internet-based applications. Additionally, the XAware Designer now includes an embedded XML/JSON converter tool for users who are required to work with multiple data formats.
3. Updated scripting language for quick implementation of business logic - The new release updates its powerful XA Script language to speed the development of business logic, enhance control constructs (looping and conditionals), and add better flexibility in treating optional data. New features for database processing provide increased control during database inserts, updates, and native calls to database functions.

The 5.4 release of XAware also introduces a Beta version for Mac OS X. XAware continues to expand its comprehensive set of executable examples, documentation, and help in the product along with video tutorials and webinars available for viewing at XAware.org, with the aim of turning new users into productive data services developers in a matter of hours.

Additional details about this release can be found at www.xaware.org.

About Sparxent

Sparxent is a leading technology and business solution provider focused exclusively on the middle market. By combining global best-of-breed capabilities with hands-on local professionals, Sparxent is a comprehensive and single source for IT consulting, software and services.

About XAware

XAware is an open source data integration solution for creating composite data services targeting SOA, WOA, and more. XAware provides users with the ability to rapidly access and integrate data with applications, web services, and business processes. XAware also makes it possible to transform data, regardless of the original source, into reusable components for Web 2.0 applications of all flavors. For community information, please visit: www.xaware.org.