What's New in TUXEDO® System 5

Novell's TUXEDO System 5 is a significant upgrade to the TUXEDO System product line. This release further expands the scalability and extensibility of the TUXEDO System, makes administration of large configurations simple, and extends TUXEDO System interoperability to include DCE environments. In addition, System 5 has been enhanced to improve the overall ease of use of the TUXEDO System. The release also expands the number of TUXEDO supported client and server platforms. Collectively, these enhancements will allow customers to more easily build and administer the large, sophisticated client/server applications required to run their businesses. New features include:

/Domains

The TUXEDO System /Domains feature allows the configuration of TUXEDO servers into administratively- autonomous groups called domains. Using this feature, systems can be scaled by combining domains together into user-defined configurations. This framework lets TUXEDO run high- performance, large-scaled applications across hundreds or thousands of nodes. It also provides a high level of administrative flexibility and security within a TUXEDO environment and allows interoperation with other TUXEDO applications running in similar or dissimilar environments, networks, geographic locations and companies. Client applications can be developed to request services that may be available on another domain. Most important, the /Domain framework is totally transparent to application programmers, making these high performance, flexible applications easy to implement.

/DCE

TUXEDO /DCE is a set of utilities and libraries that allows integration between DCE and TUXEDO applications. TUXEDO /DCE includes support for TxRPC, the X/Open standard API, which extends the DCE remote procedure call for use in transactional applications. Connectivity between TUXEDO-based applications and DCE- based applications is achieved through an RPC gateway that maps TUXEDO requests to and from the DCE RPC. In this way, TUXEDO is seen by DCE as a cell and DCE is seen by TUXEDO as a TUXEDO domain. The combination of TxRPC and RPC connectivity between TUXEDO and DCE simplifies the development and deployment of TUXEDO and DCE-based applications. It allows users to harness the strengths of each environment based on individual application needs. And DCE-based applications can be developed faster and easier using the TUXEDO System's robust development environment.

Runtime Trace

Runtime Trace allows application administrators and developers to trace the execution of a TUXEDO application, without recompiling any source code or using a special version of the TUXEDO runtime system. Many events can be traced, including calls to the TUXEDO public APIs--ATMI and XATMI. The tracing configuration is dynamic: it can be modified at any time during the execution of an application on a per- machine, per-server, or per-server- group basis. The tracing facility also provides a powerful "trigger capability," which allows an action to be executed when a trace event occurs. Trigger actions can include aborting the process to get a core dump, changing the process's trace configuration, or causing the process to sleep for a specified amount of time.

Dynamic Data-Dependent Routing

The Dynamic Data-Dependent Routing feature is valuable in environments where application data is partitioned across groups of TUXEDO servers, residing in some cases on different machines in different geographic locations. With data-dependent routing, service requests can be sent to particular servers based on selected characteristics of the request. Dynamic routing permits TUXEDO configurations to be more easily configured, expanded or optimized without bringing down the application, thus maintaining uninterrupted service.

Online Documentation

The TUXEDO System documentation is now being provided online in System 5. This online documentation can be accessed by any user or workstation attached on the network by a users documentation browser. This browser provides enhanced lookup, searching and topic linking capabilities to the user.

New Supported Server Platforms

Novell's packaged binary TUXEDO product has been expanded to support DEC OSF/1, Pyramid, SunOS, and SCO UNIX. These new ports are in addition to existing UnixWare, AIX, AT&T GIS, HP-UX, and Solaris ports. TUXEDO customers are now able to select from a variety of platforms that maximizes their freedom of choice and protects their existing investments in dissimilar hardware. These ports, in combination with those offered by Novell OEM partners, provide customers with a choice of 35 different platforms.

New Supported Client Platforms

Novell's packaged binary TUXEDO product has been expanded to support Windows NT, Macintosh, 32 bit OS/2, and client software for the new UNIX server platforms. The new client platforms are in addition to existing DOS, Windows, 16 bit 0S/2, and UNIX client support. With the addition of these new client platforms, TUXEDO can operate with virtually all clients on the market today.