Introduction

 

This topic includes the following sections:

• Overview

• Packaging

• New Features and Enhancements in this Release

• Product Upgrades

 

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Overview

In a modern, transaction-driven, global economy, your competitive resources are not only the people you hire and the products you produce, but also the software and systems that interconnect the enterprise. Mission-critical software can help you gain the competitive edge in the ever-expanding arena of globally connected electronic commerce. Transaction Monitors (TMs) is the technology upon which this competitive advantage is being built. The BEA Tuxedo system provides the best-of-breed TM for the development and deployment of your mission-critical applications.

Additionally, the BEA Tuxedo software provides businesses and organizations that depend on mission-critical applications with the flexibility of two proven programming interfaces: a Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) interface and an Application-to-Transaction Monitor Interface (ATMI). As illustrated in Figure 1-1, both interfaces use the BEA Tuxedo infrastructure, which has demonstrated, through years of use in large, transaction-based, production systems, that it is powerful, robust, scalable, manageable, and reliable.

Figure 1-1 BEA Tuxedo Product

 
 
 

CORBA Interface

The CORBA interface provides a C++ server ORB, the TP Framework, and several CORBA services, including FactoryFinder, Naming Service, Notification Service, the Interface Repository, and the Transaction Service. C++, Java, and ActiveX client ORBs are also included with the BEA Tuxedo software to support the development of remote client applications.

For more information on the BEA Tuxedo CORBA interface, see Getting Started with BEA Tuxedo CORBA Applications in the online documentation.

ATMI Interface

ATMI provides an interface for communications, transactions, and management data buffers that works in all environments supported by the BEA Tuxedo ATMI interface. ATMI defines the interface between application programs and the BEA Tuxedo system. It offers a simple interface for a comprehensive set of capabilities. It implements the X/Open distributed transaction processing (DTP) model for transaction processing. For more information on the BEA Tuxedo ATMI interface, see Introducing BEA Tuxedo ATMI in the online documentation.

 

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Packaging

The following changes have been made to the product packaging:

• The BEA Tuxedo 7.1 and BEA WebLogic Enterprise 5.1 products have been merged.

• All BEA C, C++, and COBOL application and transaction server technologies have converged.

• Jolt is now packaged with the BEA Tuxedo product, however, it is still licensed separately.

• EJB and Java server support is being provided exclusively by the BEA WebLogic Server. BEA Tuxedo 8.0 does not include support for EJBs or CORBA Java servers.

 

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New Features and Enhancements in this Release

Release 8.0 of BEA Tuxedo includes the following new features and enhancements:

• Support for Multithreaded CORBA C++ Applications

• Support for CORBA C++ Unicode Character Set

• Load Balancing Optimizations

• Support for C++ Object-by-Value Types

• Support for Single Sign-On Across ATMI and CORBA Domains

• Server Performance Enhancements

• Domain Enhancements

• Enhancements to Jolt to Improve Interoperability Between BEA WebLogic Server BEA Tuxedo ATMI

Support for Multithreaded CORBA C++ Applications

Release 8.0 of BEA Tuxedo supports multithreaded C++ client and server applications. While there are many advantages to writing multithreaded applications, there are some disadvantages such as application complexity. BEA Tuxedo 8.0 supports two threading models: thread per object and thread per request.

The characteristics of each model are as follows:

• Thread per object

  • A different thread for each object in the server process

  • Minimizes rework required to multithread an existing server

  • Customer-developed concurrency control not required

• Thread per request

  • Each client request is processed in a different thread

  • Enables long-duration requests from multiple clients

  • Requires user concurrency control mechanism

For more information on writing multithreaded applications, see Creating CORBA Server Applications in the online documentation.

Support for CORBA C++ Unicode Character Set

Release 8.0 of the BEA Tuxedo software supports international (multi-byte) characters, or wide characters. Support for wide characters enables the Unicode character set to be used in the CORBA Interface Definition Language (IDL) and in CORBA client and server applications. As part of this new functionality, the C++ IDL compiler now supports wchar and wstring data types, recursive sequences, indirect typecodes, and forward references.

For more information on support for wide characters, see the CORBA Programming Reference in the online documentation.

Load Balancing Optimizations

Release 8.0 of BEA Tuxedo includes new load balancing features. In BEA WebLogic Enterprise 5.1, in a multiprocessor configuration, load balancing randomly distributed the workload across all machines supporting a particular interface within a domain. In BEA Tuxedo 8.0, load balancing favors the local machine when distributing workload and, thus, reduces bridge traffic (see Figure 1-2).

Additionally, support for parallel objects was added to BEA Tuxedo CORBA in release 8.0 as a performance enhancement. The parallel objects feature enables you to designate all business objects in a particular application as stateless objects. The effect is that, unlike stateful business objects which can only run on one server in a single domain, stateless business objects can run on all servers in a single domain. Thus, the benefits of parallel objects are as follows:

• Parallel objects can run on multiple servers in the same domain at the same time. Thus, utilization of all servers to service concurrent multiple requests improves performance.

• When the BEA Tuxedo system services requests to parallel business objects, it always looks for an available server to the local machine first. If all servers on the local machine are busy processing the requested business object, the BEA Tuxedo system looks for an available server on other machines in the local domain. Thus, if there are multiple servers on the local machine, network traffic is reduced and performance is improved.

For more information on parallel objects, see Scaling, Distributing, and Tuning CORBA Applications in the online documentation.

Figure 1-2 Load Balancing Optimizations

 

Support for C++ Object-by-Value Types

Support for C++ object-by-value types enhances the ability of BEA Tuxedo CORBA C++ applications to access BEA WebLogic Servers 6.0 via RMI/IIOP.

For more information on object-by-value types, see Interoperability Between BEA Tuxedo 8.0 CORBA and BEA WebLogic Server 6.0 Using Object-by-Value Types.

Support for Single Sign-On Across ATMI and CORBA Domains

Support for the T-Engine security plug-in framework was provided in BEA Tuxedo 7.1 and BEA WebLogic Enterprise 5.1 (CORBA-only), but security context could not be propagated across these environments. In BEA Tuxedo 8.0, both the ATMI and CORBA environments support the same plug-in framework, and therefore, common, interoperable security is achieved.

Figure 1-3 Single Sign-On Across Domains

 

Server Performance Enhancements

BEA Tuxedo 8.0 includes the following server options that enable you to customize the server for optimal performance:

• Service and interface caching

• Turning off authorization and auditing security

• Turning off multithreaded Processing

• Turning off XA transactions

Note: The authorization, threading, and transaction options can be turned off individually, however, you should not turn off any of these features if your applications require them.

For information on how to use the above performance options, see "Tuning a BEA Tuxedo Application" in Administering a BEA Tuxedo Application at Run Time in the online documentation.

Domain Enhancements

Enhancements have been made to the BEA Tuxedo Domains software to improve performance in the following areas:

• Reduce boot time in large domain configurations—in releases prior to release 8.0 of the BEA Tuxedo software, applications that contained hundreds of domains could take a significant amount of time to boot. BEA Tuxedo 8.0 has been enhanced to substantially shorten the boot time of applications with a large number of domains.

• Enable cross-domain assignment of message priorities—in releases prior to release 8.0 of the BEA Tuxedo software, priority settings (via tpsprio calls) from client requests were ignored across domains. In order for users to provide Quality-of-Service (QOS) in their multi-domain applications, messages need to have assigned priorities and these priorities need to be propagated across domains. This can only be accomplished if the message priorities are propagated across domains. In BEA Tuxedo 8.0, message priorities are propagated across domains.

• Domain transaction auditing—in releases prior to release 8.0 of the BEA Tuxedo software, in cases where transactions cross domain boundaries (BEA Tuxedo Domains), it was not possible to track a transaction in certain situations (for example, if it was heuristically committed or aborted). This is because each domain assigns its own transaction ID to each request under transaction control. And although the audit subcommand of the dmadmin command can log the transaction IDs of requests across domain boundaries, that is, which domain the request came from or was sent to, only the local transaction ID was recorded. In BEA Tuxedo 8.0, a mapping feature has been added that records the transaction IDs of domains that the transaction was initiated in and sent to; this information is logged in the subordinate domain.

Enhancements to Jolt to Improve Interoperability Between BEA WebLogic Server BEA Tuxedo ATMI

In release 8.0, the Jolt software includes the following enhancements that improve the integration of BEA WebLogic Server with BEA Tuxedo services (see Figure 1-4):

• Propagation of BEA WebLogic Server user authentication—Jolt has been enhanced to automatically propagate user identity from BEA WebLogic Server. This means that once a user has been authenticated to the BEA WebLogic Server, there is no need to further authenticate that user to Jolt so that the connection can be made to the BEA Tuxedo service.

• Connection pools reset option—in releases prior to release 8.0 of Jolt, clients that used the Jolt connection pools were not able to re-establish connections after failures on the server side. When failures occurred (for example, the server crashed or the Jolt Station Handler (JSH) shut down), any subsequent request would fail on that connection. When this happened, it meant that the connection pools had to be torn down and reconstructed after the server side is revived. This required that the BEA WebLogic Server be restarted. To alleviate this problem, an option that resets the connection pools without stopping the Jolt client application has been added to Jolt.

• XML buffer type support—in release 8.0, Jolt has been enhanced to support XML buffer types and allow XML documents to flow from a Jolt client to a BEA Tuxedo service via data-dependent routing. This feature allows XML buffers to be specified in the Jolt repository so that the JSH can perform the buffer mapping prior to service invocation for requests and after the service invocation for replies.

• Buffer allocation enhancements—because buffer reallocations can result in performance degradation, Jolt 8.0 has been enhanced so that Jolt client requests to BEA Tuxedo services that return large buffers (>= 100K) do not cause as many internal reallocations of the buffer. For FML reply buffers, Jolt makes more accurate estimates of buffer allocations so that the number of reallocations is eliminated or reduced.

  Figure 1-4 BEA WebLogic Server Integration Enhancements

  
   

 

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Product Upgrades

Figure 1-5 shows the existing BEA Tuxedo and BEA WebLogic Enterprise products that can be upgraded to BEA Tuxedo 8.0.

Figure 1-5 Upgrade Paths