>- Is there a web page or some other useful source of online information?
Try http://tuxedo.novell.com/
I'll take a quick stab at answer your other questions...
Quote:> How is Novell keeping up with the (very good) Transarc information offerings?
I assume you are talking Encina rather than the company Transarc
(wholly owned by IBM). I think of TUXEDO and Encina as appealing to
different people and projects. Encina is more for people using DCE
and people that want an extremely functionally rich environment.
Going the DCE infrastructure route is almost as important a decision
as with OS to use. TUXEDO is more the old style UNIX philosophy of
keeping it simple stupid. I don't mean this as a negative, TUXEDO the
most popular UNIX TP Monitor, to say nothing of it being used as
general client/server middleware. The interfaces are quite simple,
yet can be put together in a surprising amount of different ways, and
the simplicity allows for very high performance.
This isn't a perfect explanation, I'm sure others will want to
clarify...
Quote:>- Does anyone have real experience building PC Win or OS2 clients? What are
> the client API's like? Did you use tools to integrate with Powerbuilder or
> the like? Which ones?
The api is the same for UNIX clients and servers as for Mac's, DOS,
Windows, WinNT, and OS/2 clients. The api is quite simple, here are
few calls to give you an idea.
tpinit - connect this app to TUXEDO (initialize the TUX run-time)
tpterm - disconnect from TUXEDO
tpbegin - start a transaction
tpcommit/tpabort - commit or abort a transaction
tpcall - call a TUXEDO service.
So a very simple client would do something like
tpinit
loop
get data from user
tpbegin
tpcall
tpcommit
display result to user
end loop
tpterm
There are also calls to do queuing, asynchronous and conversational
communication, and others. The PC tools help hide even this level of
complexity from the programmer... basically anything that can call a
DLL should be able to use TUXEDO.
See the Novell WWW site above for a list of ISV's that interoperate
with TUXEDO.
Quote:> How is TUXEDO architected? What are the pieces how do they connect together
> and work?
> - What are the actual TUXEDO client-server protocols like? How transport
> independent are they? Are they bandwidth/computationally efficient?
There are some whitepapers in the WWW site that address some of these
questions.
Quote:> - Are there XA compliant resource managers (other than the obvious RDBMSs)
> that you have used woth TUXEDO? A Reliable Queueing Service? OO-DBMS?
> Others?
TUXEDO includes a XA resource manager for queuing (TUXEDO/Q). Don't
know of any XA OO-DBMS's. Again might check the WWW site ISV list or
the OO-DBMS vendors.
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