Oracle Tuxedo 12c Launch

My first experience with Tuxedo was in 2000, when I worked for a big international trading Bank. Tuxedo was at that time still BEA Tuxedo at level 6.5. It was used as a transaction messaging system for the Foreign Exchange Money Market , which participated of  a worldwide Foreign Exchange Settlement solution called CLS.

Oracle acquired BEA , as you all know in 2008, and a long time it puzzled me what was going to happen with my “old love” Tuxedo.

Now, that’s for the history lessons but:

What is in fact Oracle Tuxedo?

Tuxedo is a transaction processing system or transaction-oriented middleware, or enterprise application server for a variety of systems and programming languages.

Tuxedo was designed for high availability and to provide  scalable applications to support a lot transactions per second on commonly available distributed systems. It was developed and designed by AT&T. They required online transaction processing (OLTP) capabilities.

Tuxedo is a  message routing and queuing system. Requests are sent to named services and Tuxedo uses memory based inter-process communication facilities to queue the requests to servers. The requester is unaware of where the server that actually processes the request is located or how it is implemented. In fact, Tuxedo was already implementing the SOA, in the early days before even the concept of SOA was familiair to any one.

Now Oracle has optimized and rebranded Tuxedo for it’s engineered system Exalogic. Oracle poses Tuxedo as the new “C, C++, COBOLApplication Server for Conventional and Cloud Environments”. From here Oracle tries to reach the Mainframe segment with their “rehosting Mainframe and COBOL applications” strategy. You could migrate those applications to an Exalogic infrastructure with in this case the Tuxedo as a middleware solution for these applications, where on the other side of the Exabus stack Coherence for JAVA applications. Tuxedo has support for various languages like C, C++, Python, JAVA, PHP, COBOL and Ruby which makes it highly flexible.

Let’s take a look to the various components Oracle Tuxedo 12c has to offer.

Oracle Tuxedo 12c Components (screenshot from tux12claunchtechwebcast_v11.pdf):

Tuxedo System and Application Monitor (TSAM)

TSAM is the solution for integrated systems monitoring. In this 12c version it is Enterprise Manager 12c ready and can be fully integrated. You can monitor the full stack of Tuxedo components, do rule based auto data purge and monitor same set of Tuxedo domains from more than one console.

Typical TSAM overview in Enterprise Manager 12c:

Tuxedo Message Q

One of famous features of Tuxedo is of course it’s messaging system. It allows messages to be queued to persistent or non-persistent storage (memory) for later processing or retrieval. ATMI, the Application-to-Transaction Monitor Interface (ATMI) provides an interface that allow messages to be added to or read from queues. All the best of of Tuxedo /Q and Oracle MessageQ have been put together, and provides dual-api, Tuxedo /Q API (for compatibility) TMQ API (access to all features). Some of the combined features are:

• Offline message queues.
• Message journals.
• Delivery notification.
• Store and forward between queues across domains.
• XA transaction support.
• Publish/Subscribe
• Asynchronous messaging
• Dynamic queues.
• Naming services. 

Tuxedo Adapters

Tuxedo has some adapters:

• JCA Adapter: This adapter  is a wrapper to the WebLogic Tuxedo Connector (WTC) as part of WebLogic/JAVA Integration. WTC can only be used on WebLogic, but the JCA adapter allows deploying these  capabilities  between between Oracle Tuxedo applications and JAVA applications. It can call several Tuxedo services out of JAVA Apps like servlets, JSPs, EJBs and POJOs, and also the other way around. In this way you can integrate Tuxedo services into your other existing SOA layer.
• Mainframe Adapters: This includes SNA and TCP adapters which consists of a redundant configuration for bi-directional connectivity. Whit this solution you can connect 1 CRM connects to multiple CICS/IMS regions.
• IBM MQ Adapter: This adapter is multi-threaded and event driven which reduces CPU utilization and has a better throughput. It can access MQ message headers, which uses FML32 functions to manipulate fielded buffers related to errors. With this feature applications run faster if data is transferred to structures for manipulation.

SALT WebServices

With SALT you have the possibility to expose a certain Tuxedo service as a WebService. It is a web-based configuration tool and uses a metadata repository.

Mainframe Rehosting

The magic keyword here is: Tuxedo ART (Application Runtime) for CICS, IMS. The ART Workbench helps to speed up and ease rehosting projects, by automating the code and data migration.

• CICS Programming model and Services.
• IMS TM Programming model and Services.
• Batch Execution Environment.
• Application Repository & Cataloguer.
• Language migration tools: COBOL, JCL, SQL.
• Data migration tools: VSAM and Flat Files, DB2.
• Natural/Adabas migration.
• IDEAL/Datacom migration.
• ADSO/IDMS migration.

Migrating Mainframe with ART Solution:

Development tools for programming Tuxedo 12c

The IDE that’s been utilized for Tuxedo is  the Solaris Studio IDE. It’s an integrated development environment for Tuxedo applications  with all the common features an IDE should have like creating, building, running and debugging.
Solaris Studio for Tuxedo 12c:

Optimizations for Exalogic

Oracle Tuxedo 12c is one of the components that will also run on Exalogic, especially for the mainframe rehosting story. Tuxedo has a plugin for Virtual Assembly builder and makes use of all the exclusive features of Exalogic, like Infiniband and SDP, shared memory usage and zero buffer copies for more efficient data transfer.

For installation you need to install one Tuxedo + applications across all your Exalogic nodes. The Tuxedo processes use a pointer to the shared memory segments where the actual message queue exists.

First conclusions

Personally, my “love” for Tuxedo hasn’t disseapeared and it pleases me to see how Oracle has extended it with many new features.
 
From an objective point of view: Tuxedo has been a proven concept over the years and is being used as reliable and robust by many enterprises in the financial and telco-industries. However I do think Oracle has to put great effort in getting traditional mainframe candidates into Tuxedo. But they won’t regret it if they do! 

Publicatiedatum: 1 augustus 2012

Over auteur Michel Schildmeijer

Michel started his career as a medical officer in the Royal Dutch Airforce, with a focus on pharma. After the air force, he continued in pharma, followed by time working in clinical pharmacology. While there, he transitioned to IT by learning UNIX and MUMPS, and developed a system for managing patients’ medical records. As his career developed, his responsibility shifted from a deep technical perspective to a more visionary role. At the end of 2011, Michel authored a book on WebLogic Administration for beginners. He joined Qualogy in April 2012 where he expanded his repertoire significantly, serving a wide range of customers with his knowledge about Java Application Servers, Middleware and Application Integration. He also increased his multiple-industry knowledge in his role as Solutions or IT architect by working for customers in a range of sectors, including financials, telecom, public transportation and government organizations. In 2012, he received the IT Industry-recognized title of Oracle ACE for being an ambassador and community leader in his area of expertise. In 2019, this was enhanced to Oracle ACE Director. Michel is asked regularly to speak about technology and the impact of innovation at national and international conferences such as KubeCon, Oracle OpenWorld, Groundbreakers Developers Tours and others. He contributes actively to the OpenSource community and solutions regarding containerization, CI/CD and DevOps. In October 2021, Michel took an exciting step in his career by becoming Business Unit Manager for Qualogy Managed Services. While he still has a finger on the pulse in terms of technology, he is expanding his scope by combining his experience with the new insights gained in his new position. Read more via blog: https://bit.ly/3fAxrqf | Medium: https://mschildmeijer.medium.com/ | Books: Oracle Weblogic Server 11gR1 PS2: Administration Essentials: https://bit.ly/3IhALmf | Oracle WebLogic Server 12c: First Look1: https://bit.ly/31olbpj

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