Open OLTP News

If there is anything that we at ZOIS Limited come across that we think merits a note we will put it in here. The items are in reverse chronological order, short and about OLTP on open platforms (UNIX and OS of that ilk). Older items can be found in Old Open OLTP News (which starts in May of 1998).

Jboss' ATMI Interface? (6 February 2008)

One of the announcements that has sneaked out at the Jboss jamboree is that there's a plan for a 'Tuxedo' API (presumably ATMI or its 'standardised' clone XATMI) for the Jboss architecture. There's nothing on any of JBoss's web-sites.

It should be added the Arjuna Technologies is now part of the Red Hat family too now.

Oracle Finally get BEA (16 January 2008)

Oracle's overtures now appear to have been accepted by BEA, with an offer of just over $19 a share. This has been given the green light by the BEA board and all should be a formality from here on. Oracle and BEA have directly competing products in the Java Middleware market, so expect some changes there, even if it is a mashup re-branding exercise. The future for Tuxedo is less clear, but hopefully it will be better that simply being a fossilised cash-cow.

Oracle Bids Up BEA (14 October 2007)

As many of you will have seen on other more frequently updated news sites, Oracle has made a bid for BEA (Tuxedo and Weblogic). The cash offer (so somebody's been making it lately) weighed-in at $17 a share. Since then BEA's shares have gone higher and Oracle have gone quiet.

UniKix on the Move (1 July 2006)

A company called Clerity Solutions and now acquired what was known as SUN's Mainframe Rehosting product, better known by its original moniker UniKix, the venerable CICS clone.

News on News (16 May 2006)

Just to inform our readers that things haven't completely stalled here, we can post a small round-up of the stuff that's been noted over the past year. The most amusing thing would be that web-link formally known as http://www.transarc.com is now serving 'adult' advertisements. It would appear that IBM are no longer interested in this URL and it's been bagged by a another, "Moniker Privacy Services". Transarc was the company that brought us Encina and several DCE ports. It had been bought out by IBM. Elsewhere both IBM and BEA have released new major releases of TXSeries (v6) and Tuxedo (v9), BEA's offering looks pretty much as they did at v8, and so does IBM's at the user level. IBM do appear to have done a large amount of internal work on v6 to allow the removal of the Encina Toolkit and DCE. Our spin on this is that TXSeries CICS is being prepared for the full withdrawl of Encina and DCE Real Soon Now.

DCE Goes Open (15 January 2005)

The The Open Software Foundation (OSF) have just announced on their web-site that they are releasing the source code for DCE under a GNU open-source license. While many may see DCE as moribund byzantine mid-90's grot it does form the infrastructure to a lot of important stuff (not least TXSeries CICS, Encina and ACMSxp).

Acucorp COBOL for CICS on Linux (10 January 2005)

Acucorp have announced that they'll be providing the long-in-coming CICS on Linux with COBOL support. Another indication that CICS is coming on that platform for some work has had to be done to support the language run-time.

CICS Goes Linux Real Soon Now (1 May 2004)

CICS's baby brother (styled "TXSeries CICS") underwent a dot release just the other week (see this announcement). There's the ususal stuff in there about various obscure-ish enhancements that various customers have requested, all quite tedious. But hang-on there's an statement buried in the Announcement Letter that sometime next year we'll get CICS on Linux (but it won't use DCE). CICS on Linux has been subject to some speculation on various forums, but IBM corporately always seemed a bit cool on the idea.

Veritas Brings Clustering to BEA (12 April 2004)

A curious announcement has appeared on the BEA website. Veritas and BEA are into clustering, together, for Weblogic Server (WLS) and Tuxedo. Closer analysis would suggest that together with your Weblogic you'll get Indepth, Veritas's performance analysis tool, OpForce a server management deployment tool suite and, most interestingly, Cluster Server. Presumably this will be somewhat better than Weblogic's current native clustering, right?

Merant/Micro Focus Relaunch Their CICS API with Microsoft (8 April 2003)

Micro Focus veteran COBOL compiler supplier to the PC and Minicomputer world have announced a new strategic alliance with Microsoft. This would suggest a relaunch of Micro Focus's partial CICS API implementation sometimes known as Mainframe Express (MFE), previously marketed as a development tool.

Farewell Transarc (15 July 2003)

As of about the end of last month and just noted in our web-maintenance it would appear that www.transarc.com is no longer with us (not even as a redirect to an appropriate page in IBM). A brief investigation would suggest that the move (if you can call it that) has broken a lot of links in the Encina areas of IBM's TXSeries web-site. Going to Transarc's former home page now gets you a generalised "search our web-site" 404-type page.

Update: (15 November 2003) We've sorted out our links to the former Transarc site now too. Sorry for the delay.

Somebody Likes ZOIS (11 July 2003)

Mainframe Week had declared this site (ZOIS's) as its Website of the Week. We're very proud, being in some very distinguished company. We really hope that they didn't just pick us as an obvious 'Z' entry in their A-Z index.

Update: (16 May 2006) Mainframe Week, as a web-site, sadly, now appears to be defunct.

IBM Crank TPCs Out of DB2 -- with Tuxedo (12 May 2003)

Benchmarks come and go, replete with machines stuffed full of the very fastest CPUs and memory, at a ridiculous price, normally we don't make a note of them here. IBM of late have been showing how slippery its latest hardware has been by producing benchmarks using Oracle. Oracle have exploited this in "knocking-copy" adverts that implied that somehow DB2 wasn't up to all this high-powered OLTP stuff. It obviously got to somebody in IBM, so a nice quick DB2 benchmark has been offered, but it is driven by BEA Systems' Tuxedo rather than one of IBM's AIX based Transaction Processing Monitor (TPM), Encina or CICS. So I guess we'll have to wait until BEA start knocking-copy too before we see everything IBM, together.

Everything's 8.1 at BEA (10 March 2003)

Perhaps explaining why the Tuxedo 8.1 press release looked a "little future tense" BEA's marketing department has decided to 'upgrade' everything to version 8.1. This means, for example that JRocket, BEA's Intel-only 'enhanced' Java Virtual Machine (JVM), announced last year, has the same version number as Tuxedo, the product for which the company was formed.

All this on an new-look web-site, so no doubt our Webmaster can look forward to a load of broken links next time he checks. The relaunched web-site is now running on Weblogic 7.

Update: (13 March 2003) Not too bad, reports our Webmaster, but obvious teething problems with the new site. All our BEA press-release links have been broken and the search facility on the new BEA press-release page returns 500 (server error). Those broken links have been fixed here by removing them, but may be put back in the future, if we can be bothered.

Update: (1 April 2003) Weblogic 8.1 has now on General Availability.

Tuxedo 8.1 (10 February 2003)

Tuxedo 8.1 has been announced by The Register, but not by BEA Systems themselves. The Register's article is short on detail about 8.1 but right about Tuxedo's importance as a continuing and major revenue stream for BEA.

Update: (11 February 2003) BEA have now announced 8.1 too. The first impression is a lot is coming Real Soon Now, depending upon other product releases.

The highlights:

• The Weblogic/Tuxedo Connector (WTC) will be wrapped as a Weblogic Workshop Control (and thus use goodness found there, BEA give SOAP as an example). Note the future tense.
• Tuxedo has had an XML parser since version 7, but soon 8.1 will incorporate (we read this as "will migrate to") Xerces (as used by everybody). Note the future tense.

So the general direction is still putting Tuxedo into a Java world, but nothing that might prove useful to a Websphere user like J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA).

Wither Weblogic 8 (8 February 2003)

Weblogic 8.1 seems to be coming soon (all be it in beta). BEA Systems have created 40 new news groups all with the names weblogic.developer.interest.<something> over on the BEA Newsgroups servers (where <something> is about Weblogic 8.1). No explanation or official BEA postings, just the occasional note from folk wanting to know when and where.

Worried about keeping up with BEA? The current Weblogic (version 7) web-site is served by, and we quote: "WebLogic 5.1.0 Service Pack 10 07/11/2001 21:04:48 #126882". It must be a good stable release for it has not changed since Weblogic 7 was announced a year ago.