BEA tries on new Tuxedo

BEA Systems will launch an upgrade to the Tuxedo transaction monitor on Tuesday and bolster Tuxedo in service-based environments.

Tuxedo is being used heavily in mainframe re-hosting projects, in which applications are migrated to run on Tuxedo. “We’re working toward a strategic direction, in essence, in which we’re putting Tuxedo competing head-to-head with mainframes,” said Lorenzo Cremona, director of product marketing for Tuxedo at BEA.

With version 10 being launched Tuesday, BEA is adding support for SSL for network links, meaning SSL will work across Tuxedo domains.

“It’s an implementation of a widely accepted standard. Before, we had our own proprietary way of encrypting across-network links,” Cremona said. Advanced encryption for passwords is featured as well, based on Advanced Encryption Standard. Also added is the ability to interact or authenticate across widely accepted directories, such as Active Directory, Sun’s LDAP, and RACF (Remote Control Access Facility).

Used by very large customers, such as banks, government agencies and telecommunications companies, Tuxedo supports applications written in C, C++, and Cobol. Once serving as the company’s flagship product, Tuxedo transaction has passed through multiple hands, including AT&T, Unix System Laboratories, and Novell before BEA’s founders acquired rights to it in 1996. 

BEA also is adding an adapter for IBM MQSeries, to connect Tuxedo directly to MQSeries message systems. “It’s a two-way adapter that allows us to receive messages from MQSeries as well as propagate messages to MQSeries,” Cremona said. The adapter is based on BEA’s eLink technology for connecting to mainframe environments. eLink had been discontinued but is being revived as part of Tuxedo.

The adapter also serves as a way to extend mainframe applications to SOA via Tuxedo. With the adapter, Tuxedo acts as a re-hosting platform for mainframe applications.

BEA has fine-tuned its WebLogic Server application server connector to Tuxedo. This enables transparency of interactions between Tuxedo applications and BEA’s J2EE container.

With the SALT (Services Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo) 2.0 platform also being launched Tuesday, BEA is now supporting bidirectional Web services. With the 1.1 version of SALT, external applications could call Tuxedo Web services. In version 2.0, Tuxedo applications are once again exposed as Web services, but external applications can be called as well.

“It can have Web services come into Tuxedo,” Cremona said.

Also added in the 2.0 release is support for the WS-Security standard for Web services security.

Additionally, BEA is unveiling TSAM (Tuxedo System and Application Monitor) 1.1, a performance monitoring and tracing framework for Tuxedo. It supports end-to-end request monitoring and tracing of transactions with a data collection framework.