![BEA BEA Tuxedo Release [Release Number]](../images/top.gif)
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Product Features
This topic includes the following sections:
Introduction
The BEA Tuxedo system provides state-of-the-art, proven software that enables businesses to take advantage of distributed software applications. BEA Tuxedo software makes it possible to design, program, and administer reliable, scalable, and secure distributed applications in a cost-effective manner.
The following sections discuss some of the capabilities and benefits of this product.
Proven Infrastructure
The BEA Tuxedo infrastructure has a proven track record of reliability and scalability. It provides efficient routing, dispatching, and management of application service requests, event postings and notification, and applications queues. After years of use in mission critical production environments, it has earned its reputation as the best transaction management software in the industry.
Support for Popular Platforms
Ideally, client/server software should be independent of hardware or operating system platforms. This allows you to mix client and server platforms and deploy client and server applications on different hardware using different operating systems, optimizing the type of work that each performs. In harmony with this, release 8.0 of the BEA Tuxedo system supports the following platforms:
Note: Additional platforms will be supported in the near future. For the latest information on supported platforms, contact BEA Customer Service.
Interoperability and Coexistence
Release 8.0 of the BEA Tuxedo software can interoperate and coexist with older versions of the BEA Tuxedo software, BEA WebLogic Enterprise, and BEA WebLogic Server.
For more information on interoperability and coexistence, see Interoperability and Coexistence.
Scalability
This topic includes the following sections:
Application Scalability Requirements
Many applications perform adequately in an environment where between 1 to 10 server processes and 10 to 100 client applications are running. However, in an enterprise environment, applications may need to support hundreds of execution contexts (where the context can be a thread or a process), tens of thousands of client applications, and millions of objects at satisfactory performance levels.
Subjecting an application to exponentially increasing demands quickly reveals any resource shortcomings and performance bottlenecks in the application. Scalability is therefore an essential characteristic of BEA Tuxedo applications.
You can build highly scalable BEA Tuxedo applications by:
BEA Tuxedo Scalability Features
Using the BEA Tuxedo system, you can quickly scale your applications to match varying system load demands because services and servers can be replicated and distributed easily.
The BEA Tuxedo product supports large-scale application deployments by:
For more information about scaling, see "Tuning Your Application" in Administering a BEA Tuxedo Application at Run Time and Scaling, Distributing, and Tuning CORBA Applications in the online documentation.
Support for Industry Standards
The BEA Tuxedo CORBA environment supports the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) developed by the Object Management Group. The OMG is a non-profit consortium that produces and maintains computer industry specifications for interoperable enterprise applications.
For more information about the CORBA specifications, interfaces, CORBA Services, and C++ Language Mappings supported by the BEA Tuxedo product, see the CORBA Programming Reference in the online documentation.
State of the Art Security
Release 8.0 of the BEA Tuxedo product includes security features that allow you to build secure Application-to-Transaction Monitor Interfaces (ATMI) and CORBA applications.
Security refers to techniques for ensuring that data stored in a computer or passed between computers is not compromised. Most security measures involve proof material and data encryption, where the proof material is a secret word or phrase that gives a user access to a particular program or system, and data encryption is the translation of data into a form that cannot be interpreted.
Distributed applications such as those used for electronic commerce (e-commerce) offer many access points for malicious people to intercept data, disrupt operations, or generate fraudulent input; the more distributed a business becomes, the more vulnerable it is to attack. Thus, the distributed computing software, or middleware, upon which such applications are built must provide security.
Security Features
The security features of the BEA Tuxedo 8.0 product let you establish secure connections between servers and clients to servers. The following security features are provided:
The full set of BEA Tuxedo security features is delivered on the BEA Tuxedo software CD-ROM, but the LLE and SSL protocol features and the security plug-ins cannot be used without a additional licensing. For information about enabling the LLE and SSL protocol features, see Installing the BEA Tuxedo System.
Security Plug-ins
With the exception of LLE, the BEA Tuxedo security capabilities are implemented through the security plug-in interface. This interface enables BEA Tuxedo customers to independently define and dynamically add their own security plug-ins. A security plug-in is a code module that implements a particular security capability.
The specifications for the security plug-in interface are not generally available, but are available to third-party security vendors who have entered into a special agreement with BEA Systems. BEA Tuxedo customers who want to customize a security capability can contact one of the third-party security vendors. For example, a BEA Tuxedo customer who wants a custom implementation of public key security must acquire the appropriate plug-ins.
For more information about security plug-ins, including third-party security vendors, see your BEA account executive.
For more information on security in ATMI and CORBA applications, see Using Security in ATMI Applications and Using Security in CORBA Applications respectively in the online documentation.
Transactions
A powerful feature of the BEA Tuxedo system is the ability to manage transactions for database applications that support the XA-interface. Transactions simplify the writing of distributed applications. They allow your application to cope more easily with a large set of problems that can occur in distributed environments, such as machine, program, and network failures.
In a distributed architecture, a local machine involved in a transaction can communicate with a remote machine which may, in turn, communicate with another remote machine. The communication and the work done by the remote machines is part of the transaction, and integrity must be maintained. Keeping track of distributed transaction processing can be a complex task because the system must maintain enough information about a transaction to be able to roll it back (that is, to undo it) at any moment.
Figure 2-1 BEA Tuxedo Transaction Manager
To keep track of the participants in a transaction, the BEA Tuxedo system creates a transaction log. To maintain the state of an application as represented by the contents of the computer's memory, the BEA Tuxedo system uses one or more resource managers (RMs) (a collection of information and processes for accessing it, such as a database management system). To coordinate all the operations performed and all the modules affected by a transaction, the BEA Tuxedo system uses a Transaction Manager (TM), which directs the actions of the RMs. Together, TMs and RMs maintain the atomicity of a distributed transaction. For more information about transactions, see Introducing BEA Tuxedo ATMI and Using CORBA Transactions in the online documentation.
Web Accessible BEA Tuxedo Services
Using BEA WebLogic Server and Jolt, you can make BEA Tuxedo ATMI services accessible on the Web (see Figure 2-2).
Figure 2-2 Making BEA Tuxedo ATMI Services Web Accessible
Management Tools
The BEA Tuxedo system gives you a choice of several methods for performing the same set of administrative tasks for either BEA Tuxedo ATMI or CORBA environments. Whether you are more comfortable using a graphical user interface or entering commands at a shell prompt, you will be able to find a comfortable method of doing your job as the administrator of a BEA Tuxedo application. The following figure illustrates the tools you can use to write the configuration file and administer your BEA Tuxedo application during run time.
Figure 2-3 Administration Tools
For more about using the management tools, see Setting Up a BEA Tuxedo Application in the online documentation.
Support for Multiple Programming Models and Languages
BEA Tuxedo supports two programming models and three languages.
The supported programming models are:
The supported programming languages are:
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