What Is the BEA Tuxedo System?


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The BEA Tuxedo system is a middleware product that distributes applications across multiple platforms, databases, and operating systems using message-based communications and, if desired, distributed transaction processing.

Middleware is used with client/server applications to distribute processing among multiple servers, manage distributed transactions, and integrate multiple database platforms. Middleware systems are sometimes known as "on-line transaction processing" or "OLTP" systems.

The BEA Tuxedo system is a mature product based on over 15 years of development from a diverse group of technology companies including AT&T, UNIX System Laboratories (USL), Novell, and BEA Systems, Inc. It is both a development platform and an execution platform. The BEA Tuxedo system serves as an extension to the operating system.

The BEA Tuxedo system provides the following:

An industry standard for the creation and central administration of distributed on-line transaction applications in a heterogeneous client/server environment.
Ease of use for application developers, who do not need to know all the details about server locations, routing, or platforms used. In a BEA Tuxedo application, these aspects of a program are transparent.
The fundamental underpinnings for creating, managing, and maintaining reliable, high performance, easily managed distributed systems.

Features of the BEA Tuxedo System

The BEA Tuxedo system offers many features to accommodate the needs of the administrator, architect, and programmer of an application.

Administrative Features

Password security and access control security—password security allows application designers to control access by requiring passwords at initialization time (authentication). Further control is available through authorization, a means of restricting access to certain application services to clients that have been given explicit permission and that have authenticated identities.
System events notification—the BEA Tuxedo system provides details about system events, such as servers dying and network failures. When an event is posted by clients or servers, the EventBroker looks up all the subscribers to that event and takes appropriate actions, as determined by each subscription.
The MIB (Management Information Base)—an administrative interface that enables you to monitor, configure, and tune your application through your own programs. It is an implementation-independent management database defined as a set of FML attributes, which allows you to query or change information.
Web-based administration—a graphical user interface, available through the World Wide Web, for the configuration and control of BEA Tuxedo applications.

Architectural Features

Distributed services—allow transparent access to application and/or system services located on different hardware platforms.
Fast, connectionless communications—clients connect to a bulletin board rather than to servers, thus improving system performance.
Scalability—you can quickly scale your application to match varying system load demands because services and servers can be replicated and distributed easily. You can set thresholds programmatically to enable the BEA Tuxedo system to spawn new servers or to shut down servers automatically.
Server transparency—the directory of services on the bulletin board maps service names to servers; clients do not need to be aware of server identity.

Programming Features

Communication techniques—the application programming interface (API) for the BEA Tuxedo system is a superset of X/Open's XATMI interface called the Application-to-Transaction Monitor Interface or ATMI. The Tuxedo ATMI is a rich set of communication techniques for writing distributed applications.
Distributed Transaction Processing (DTP)—allows work being done throughout a distributed application to be atomically completed—an essential characteristic of any OLTP system.
Typed buffers—provide transparent handling of application data across heterogeneous platforms.
X/Open TX compliance—the BEA Tuxedo system conforms to the X/Open interface standard for transaction demarcation.
X/Open XA compliance—the BEA Tuxedo system conforms to the X/Open interface standard for transaction database systems (called resource managers). As a result, you can mix and match databases within one application while maintaining data integrity.