- Brixton Back (15 December 2002)
- Pass the parcel! If Brixton hasn't been sold, or renamed, or the
company that owns it hasn't been renamed or sold it wouldn't be a year in
IT. It's now in the hands of Alebra who've decided to call it "Brixton"
once more. SunLink users find that SunLink which effectively is Brixton
is being discontinued as a brand and new purchasers will have to get
the "real" Brixton.
Update: (26 January 2003) Feedback from
folk at Alebra has corrected us on the previous owners of Brixton. So
CNT had Brixton all along and now it is with Alebra. They ask us to point
out that SunLink was an OEM Brixton and that Brixton continues to be
actively marketed by both SUN and Alebra. More at Alebra's Brixton
web-site. We've updated our Old Open OLTP News and historic ramblings about this
fine product too.
- Small Systems CICS Back on NT (15 October 2002)
- Having just proclaimed its death (below) we find that Small
System CICS (or at least that's what we call it) is back on Windows
(2000 and NT). This is the original CICS for Windows prior to
when TXSeries CICS (based on the Encina Tool Kit) was ported to
this Microsoft platform. This CICS has been hanging on in the OS/2
world but was part of a Visual Age offering on NT (you had to have
insiders' knowledge where to find it) and it seemed to have been
deliberately kept off NT to stop it competing with its bigger and
better featured brother.
It will be interesting to see how the two match up now they're
both offered on the same platform again. Naturally they share the
same version numbers (5).
- CICS OS/2 and CICS 400 No Longer "Products" (29 August 2002)
- The normal maintenance on this web-site shows up some broken links
in the redesigned CICS pages at IBM. Interestingly, apart from formal
announcements, both CICS for the OS/2 and OS400 platforms are no longer
products that we need to know about. At time of writing they were
still being supported, but it looks terminal for these two fine CICSes.
- TXSeries 5 Out (13 March 2002)
- IBM have announced TXSeries Version 5, continuing the latest
fashion amongst vendors for incrementing the major version number
every release. This is however a sort of catch-up with support for the
latest versions of various operating systems, the inclusion of IIOP for
Encina (so we guess that parts out of beta, finally) and Java. What's
interesting is the list of restrictions, which include no Java on HP-UX
(is HP-UX's JVM good or what?), IIOP only on AIX and RPC only (DCE light)
on Windows, the former Digital DCE for Windows which this stuff ran on
now substituted. We note that there's no mention of Websphere Enterprise Edition (WSEE) so
TXSeries may now available separately.
- WLS 7 Out (26 February 2002)
- BEA Systems have announced Weblogic 7. The main thing that seems to be new
over 6 in its support for Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) is that it now complies
with J2EE 1.3, which is J2EE 1.2 with the IBM sponsored J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) and
asynchronous communication. No JCA for Tuxedo yet from BEA, we note,
and IBM have been quick to put some stories in the media to say that they were
1.3 some time ago, but obviously didn't make quite so big a fuss of it.
For the recent client of ours who was worried that they weren't keeping up
with all the major releases of BEA's products, that announcement
is (or was initially) served on, and we quote, "WebLogic 5.1.0 Service
Pack 10 07/11/2001 21:04:48 #126882".
We will be downloading and evaluating, so more soon.
- CICS EJB Ready for the Big Time? (4 December 2001)
- IBM have now released CICS TS 2.2. When CICS TS 2.1 was released, it
was the first CICS to have an Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) Container to allow
EJBs to executed in CICS. IBM at the time advised not to "bet the farm" on
it. Now we have 2.2, and there's much evidence that Hursley, home to
CICS, has been hard at work on the Java parts of CICS (as well as some
other bits, such as Translator/Compiler combos). Early adopters will no
doubt let us know if all this effort has been justified and if we
should bet the farm or not.
- New WSEE (1 October 2001)
- IBM have announce a new version of Websphere Enterprise Edition (WSEE). This new version
(labelled 4.0) is a radical upgrade for it is now substantially based on
code that which is found in the more successful Advanced Edition (WSAE)
rather than IBM's Object Transactions Services (OTS) offering, Component Broker. This new WSEE is
still the place to find TXSeries CICS and Encina.
- SUN now has UniKix (25 September 2001)
- UniKix, the veteran CICS clone on Open platforms (and
Windows NT) is off on its travels again. After briefly (about a
year) being in Critical Path's custody who renamed it, twice,
and redesigned its web-pages, it is SUN who now own it (according
to a press release). The support pages promptly disappeared
from Critical Path's web site. SUN, unsurprisingly, have renamed
UniKix, yet again. This time it's called MTP_LINK. Things are still
bedding in, but this part of SUN, although not mentioning UniKix
by name, have resurrected the UniKix URL. Amusingly the site is
hosted on Linux and served by Apache rather than anything that SUN
might sell.
Update: (16 December 2001) Revisiting
this we find that the term `MTP' now has been down played in favour
of "Mainframe-Affinity", so the name changes yet again. Everything
under the UniKix URL is now passworded too.
- SUN and IBM At One (15 June 2001)
- Websphere 4.O is coming, that much is known form the Web-site. What is
interesting, amongst the better-bigger-faster type whats-new section is
that this Websphere will be EJB 2.0 certified. So IBM and SUN have
kissed and made-up, ('twas not always the case).
- IBM Rename Everything - Nearly (15 June 2001)
- IBM Marketing is at it again. Websphere, as one knows, is already a
pretty diverse set of products. Now it gets even more diverse as (it
seems) everything under the sun becomes
Websphere-<something> The latest to get "the treatment"
is IBM's successful, venerable, reliable queuing and message orientated
middleware offering. No longer MQ Series it's now Websphere MQ.
- Bye-bye Informix (24 April 2001)
- Informix has announced that it's selling its core Open System
Relational Database Management (RDBM) stuff to IBM, who as I'm
sure you know already has some products in this area. We'll leave
you to draw your own inferences from that. Informix the company
continues to reinvent itself as Ascential and are hanging on to
Cloudscape a `pure-java' database aimed at the Enterprise Java Beans (EJB)
market.
Informix is fondly remembered as being the first commercial RDMS
with an XA interface.
Update: (5 August 2003) During
maintenance of this site we find that the www.cloudscape.com (and
indeed cloudscape.com) no longer have a DNS entry. It is also noted
that cloudscape.com is owned by IBM. So something happened to
Cloudscape but we're not sure what.
Update: 10 October 2007 Ascential was
eventually bought out by IBM (in 2005) and their web-presence has now
ended.
- Another Name Change for Brixton (20 March 2001)
- The venerable Systems Network Architecture (SNA) software from CNT, once known as
Brixton, gets yet another name change (and a new web-site). It's
now called Propelis EAi.
Update: (September 2001) CNT have sold
their Propelis stuff to Jacada.
Update: (January 2003) Thanks to feedback
from Alebra we know that this sale did not include Brixton.
- CICS going EJB (19 March 2001)
- The latest edition of CICS Transaction has just
fallen through the letter-box of
ZOIS Towers. Importantly
it announces the availability of CICS TS V2.1. This is the CICS
that a lot of folk have been waiting for, it is the CICS with
Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). CICS has been moving in this direction for some
time (as indeed has IMS) and it has long been something of an
open secret that the worlds most popular Transaction Processing Monitor (TPM) would become by
turns an EJB Container (but at the same time still be CICS). As ever
the CICS folk are careful to leverage the existing zillions of lines of
`ordinary' CICS programs with this new technology and offer a number
of connecting solutions.
Disappointingly IBM did not seem to announce this on the CICS News web
site, so one wonders what that's for then.
Update: (2 April 2001) Stuff is starting
to appear on the on IBM's CICS Web-site, specifically a page dedicated
to CICS TS Version 2. There we find that the great leap forward is in the use
of `re-usable' JVMs. You are further advised there that you are not to
go out and bet the farm doing EJBs with this CICS but you can play
with it until V2.2 comes along, when things get serious.
- New WebLogic Enterprise and Tuxedo (1 March 2001)
- At a recent promotional event, BEA Systems have announced a new Weblogic Enterprise (WLE),
labelled 6.0, but we won't get to play with it until June. The major
change as far as we can see is that Tuxedo is more tightly integrated
into the WLE model and since the Tuxedo in this WLE has been given
the label 8.0 we can assume that at last we will also get all the Tuxedo
7.0 goodness (such as XML support) that we've had to do without in the
currently supported 6.5. Other than that the announcement looks a bit thin,
with the only other point of note is integrated authentication to Web
Logic Server (WLS) and Tuxedo and therefore to the CORBA M3 stuff too.
- A New Workable JVM for IBM's Big Iron (15 January 2001)
- Java programs, once compiled run in a byte-code interpreter called a
Java Virtual Machine (JVM). IBM have been putting a lot of work into the
JVMs that run on z/OS (or OS/390, as was). In a few days time we will see
the availability of a new Websphere for IBM mainframes which supports Java
1.3, and Enterprise Java 2. Websphere is IBM's pure Enterprise Java Beans (EJB)
Container (on the Mainframe at least, the word Websphere covers a host
of sins). It effectively means there's a new JVM and we ask "with this
new JVM, can an EJB CICS or IMS be far behind?"
- New WebLogic Server (11 December 2000)
- A new Weblogic Server (WLS) major release (6.0) has now been
announced by BEA Systems. From what we can see the major new items are:
- Java Messaging Service (JMS)
- A Java based Reliable Queue system
- Full J2EE Support
- The Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Specification is the latest and fullest specification for
Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). There's been a bit of spat in the Java world
about paying up for Certification from SUN, so it is interesting that
BEA is announcing Certification and that they SUN have kissed and made up.
One wonders how much that cost. As far as we are aware IBM's
position on J2EE Certification has not changed has not changed.
- More Better XML.
- Every bodies going XML mad these days. More better XML support.
- Better Clustering.
- WLS already had clustering, it would appear that it is better (which
may mean debugged, depending upon your perhaps cynical point of view).
Update: (5 January 2001)
Gimlet-eyed readers may have noticed that the above item used to refer
to the M3 based Weblogic Enterprise (rather than Server, as it does
now). It just to show you that Mr. OLTP is also confused by all this
"co-branding" too.
- Websphere gets Personal (1 December 2000)
- IBM have announced some additional stuff that allows the production of
personalized web pages on the fly (based on information stored as
Web browser Cookies). This personalization idea is quite trendy at the
moment but there are some privacy issues with it.
- IMS 7 Now Available (27 October 2000)
- Now generally available, the latest version of IMS. This
is the IMS that you can program in Java, the TP Programming language
de jour. You can talk XML to it and it has enhanced TCP/IP
connectivity to get its data to the World Wide Web. As with CICS on MVS,
er, OS/390, er, z/OS, Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) are not there, just yet.
- Critical Path Acquires UniKix (23 October 2000)
- A company called Critical Path have acquired PeerLogic and along with
it UniKix the seminal CICS clone for UNIX (and Operating Systems
of that ilk). The old PeerLogic web site has simply been transposed
onto the Critical Path one and it has to be assumed that Critical Path
are still digesting the meal.
Update: (27 October 2000)
Critical Path have renamed the UniKix suite LiveContent TRANS to fit
in with their other products' naming convention. Nice new graphics,
white papers and so forth on the pages dedicated to this re-launched
Transaction Processing Monitor (TPM). One of the papers even seem to promise Enterprise Java Beans (EJB)
support shortly.
Update: (15 December 2000)
Critical Path seem to like renaming things. As part of some overall
renaming scheme (everything called In<Somthing>), LiveContent TRANS
is now called InJoin TRANS.
Update: (24 September 2001)
SUN have purchased InJoin TRANS from Criical Path and renamed it
MTP_LINK.
- CICS goes EJB Real Soon Now (12 October 2000)
- IBM have just published the latest copy of CICS
Transaction 390, a sales/news brochure. This, issue 9, will
be the last one too, the next will have to be CICS Transaction
z/OS (or something). Anyway we digress, this fine publication
has the first public announcement about the next Mainframe CICS,
CICS Transaction Series 2. As widely expected this will have a full
Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) capability (the current version does
have Java and the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) but not EJB). Not much a secret but the
articles appearance suggests that it will be here Real Soon Now.
If CICS is there IMS can not be far behind.
- Egeneration Stories (22 August 2000)
- BEA Systems have announced and are sponsoring something called
Egeneration, a site dedicated to bringing you stories about Web centric
E-commerce. We (that is the wider OLTP community) are supposed to
submit these stories too. We (that is
ZOIS) havn't had a
chance to review this site too thoroughly, but as it is a BEA thing
(running on Weblogic) we don't expect that many rants from disaffected
Top End users or Websphere success stories.
Update: (21 May 2002) The Egeneration site
appears to be no longer serving and doesn't have a DNS entry too. If
you're still interested there's always The Archive.
- Websphere WAP-ification (2 June 2000)
- IBM have announced Websphere Transcoding Publisher a new member of the growing Websphere
family. This product will, or is supposed to, convert Web content to fit the
somewhat restrictive Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Mobile 'phone format on the fly so companies do
not have to maintain two sets of content.
Update: (29th August 2000)
BEA appear to have similar technology which they call Weblogic M-Commerce Solution.
- Tuxedo 7 Out (23 February 2000)
- Tuxedo 7.1 has now been announced by BEA. This latest Tuxedo has a
number of new and fashionable features, at a glance here's what we see:
- XML support:
- XML is becoming the De-facto way of encoding more complexed
information that is found in business-to-business transactions. Tuxedo
now knows about XML and can do data-dependent routing upon it, much
like it could with the proprietary VIEW mechanism.
- Public Key Security:
- You could do this in Tuxedo 6, but changes make this easier to
use. Public Key Infrastructure is the use of different public and
private password to allow Transactions to be "signed". See PGP
and RSA for more information on this.
- Multi-Threaded Servers:
- Old Encina hands may wonder if this is really that clever.
You can now write multi-threaded Services in Application Servers and
Tuxedo's Transaction Management won't loose the plot (or any
Transactions).
- Corel buys Inprise (9 February 2000)
- Inprise aka Borland have been purchased by Coral, they of
WordPerfect and now arch-Linux evangelizers. While much of the
industry comment elsewhere has been about the ex-Borland products,
like their Pascal and C compilers being brought to Linux one has to
note that Inprise are biggish players in the On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) world with
ENTERA and now their Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) stuff, Linux could
therefore become their preferred platform.
Update: (16th May 2000)
This has now been called off, with Coral showing an increasingly fragile
financial position.
- BEA Makes Moves in the WAP Arena (30 January 2000)
- Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), a stripped down HTTP/XML-ish protocol stack
especially designed for fancy mobile phones, is supposed to be the Next
Great Thing. BEA Systems have now announced an alliance with one of its
chief proponents, Nokia, to provide the necessary expertise and
software in this area. WAP is widely touted as not just allowing mobile
and wireless content (such as airline and train timetables) but also
mobile and wireless Transactions (such as booking airline and train
tickets). The synergy between mobile telephone and On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) companies
was thus inevitable, expect more similar announcements soon.
- A Spat in Java World (17 December 1999)
- A minor falling out appears to have happened in the
Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) community about the latest and greatest Java,
the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Specification. Not only have SUN removed Java from the
standardization process that they were pursuing with the supposedly SUN
friendly European ECMA, but they now want a piece of the revenue
action from J2EE branded products. So far Inprise have said nothing;
BEA Systems appear to have said that they'll pay, but not that much and
IBM have said they won't.
Surprisingly to some, this actually can be construed as good
news. There appears to be success on the horizon for this form of Java
and the sharks can smell money.
- BEA buys Beans (15 November 1999)
- BEA Systems still in acquisitive mode have splashed out on Theory Center,
a company specialising in the supply of Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). This
means that not only will BEA be able to supply the infrastructure for
such components but the components themselves too. Theory Center
supplied a number of ready made beans under the name Jumpstart.
- OpenUTM on Linux (5th November 1999)
- The links to UTM have been restored after a brief hiatus
surrounding the reorganisation of Siemen's computer division and the
creation of Fujitsu-Siemens. Looking on their site we note that they've
finally announced Open UTM on Linux, available for download. This makes
two TPM on this platform (Tuxedo was already there).
- The Death of Top End (2nd October 1999)
- The latest release of Tuxedo (6.5) is now out. It has a
Tuxedo/Top End Service Gateway transition product in it for Top End customers. Elsewhere
on the new look site Top End has disappeared from everything but old
press releases announcing its purchase. I think its fair to say
that Top End customers are actively being encouraged to go for Tuxedo
and Top End as a stand alone product is effectively dead.
- BEA Relaunch (29th August 1999)
- BEA Systems have relaunched and rebadged themselves. They get a new logo
and refocus on their Weblogic product. Weblogic is an Java Application
Server and the Enterprise version of this has the OTM M3 to make
its Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) Transactional and scalable (it competes
directly with Websphere, see below). For traditionalists, Tuxedo is
still prominently mentioned but Top End has disappeared as a product.
The relaunch coincides with a seminar tour by Jeri Edwards and Robert
Orfali, authors and coauthors of some books ([Edwards],
[Orfali & Harkey]), and is well worth attending.
I know, not only a page on OTM, but one also on these EJBs and their
servers too. Soon.
Update: (22nd November 1999)
This has actually been done now, see the papers on Object Oriented Transactions and the Web.
- Websphere (22nd August 1999)
- With out much fuss at all (and no announcement on their What's New
pages) IBM have introduced Websphere Enterprise Edition (WSEE). There are now three
Webspheres, an everyday one with a Java Virtual Machine to brew up Java
serverlets on your favourite HTML server; the same, but with an Object
Request Broker (ORB) and a bigger all singing, all dancing Websphere
EE. This one is interesting to us because it is transactional. In
addition to the Java stuff it has both Encina and CICS TPM, an OTM
(Component Broker) to give the Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) Transactions
and make them scaling. The whole lot can be managed by Tivoli.
BEA are covering this ground with the Weblogic family too,
introducing their transactional technology into a Java Application
Server. Yeh, yeh, I know, those pages on JTS, OTS and OTMs will appear
soon.
- Another
ZOIS? (21st August 1999)
- I suppose it had to happen. As of 30th June 1999 it appears that
the zois.com domain has now been registered by a company called Sentra
Holdings Ltd., S.A. of Riga. It is not known what this Latvian company
does or has planned for the domain; this company is not affiliated to
us (
ZOIS Ltd.) in any way. By the way
other ZOIS dot something names still seem up for
grabs. This includes the Latvian zois.lv, but not zois.gr, which
belongs to Efstathiou Zois, a Greek marine supply company. Thinking on,
as things progress, we may set up a list of other "ZOIS"
sites. Look in Mr. OLTP's answers
to find out about ZOIS's name.
Update: (28th November 1999)
Sentra Holdings appear to have let their claim to zois.com lapse, so we
have decided to register it, having had complaints about zois.com's
broken web site.
Update: (21st October 2000)
As they are starting to proliferate we've now produced an other "zois" sites
page with details of "zois" domains having a web presence.
- VSE/ESA CICS Transaction Series
(30th June 1999)
- As predicted a new VSE/ESA CICS is out. Confusingly called Transaction
Series version 1 it is the CICS that MVS customers got in February,
see below.
- BEA Still Acquisitive and Making a Loss
(30th June 1999)
- After buying Web Logic and Top End BEA made a hefty loss again this
year, according to accounts just release on their web page. The
statement of accounts is strong on the revenue growth that these
products brought with them and is Bullish about further growth by
acquisition.
- BEA Caught in Legal Cross-fire
(10th May 1999)
- RSA, no strangers to the courtroom, have got their Legal Eagles
gunning for Novell. Novell sold Tuxedo to BEA Systems which contains
RSA patented encryption stuff (you know, public key encryption). RSA
want a pound of flesh (groan) because Novell were arguably not to sell
this technology on to a third party.
Where this leaves BEA is not known at this point, they have just
gotten an export license for 128 bit encryption too.
- Tuxedo on Linux
(1st May 1999)
- Long rumoured to be in the works there has now been an official
announcement from BEA about a Linux version of Tuxedo. This is the first
commercial TPM onto this platform (but see what has been happening in
the groves of Academia).
- CICS TS 1.3
(15th February 1999)
- Just noted that the latest and greatest Mainframe CICS had now been
released by IBM. It has got a lot of interesting goodies in it and its new
Web focus will impact the use of the UNIX based CICS, where this was
used extensively as Web gateway. Java makes an appearance as a language
you can code Transaction Programs in (Services to Tuxedo folks). There
is also provision to allow Object Oriented CORBA type access to existing
Transaction Programs, possibly its most interesting new feature now we
have all spent zillions of dollars making sure these programs will run
in the new millennium. More on the OS/390 CICS web site of course,
and it is understood that VSE users will be getting similar functionality
in their CICS to real soon now.
- TXSeries
(17th October 1998)
- TXSeries from IBM is now generally available on AIX, Solaris (Sparc
architecture), HP-UX (PA-Risc architecture) and Microsoft Windows NT
(Intel 386 architectures). TXSeries is a bundled version of the
latest CICS based on the Encina Tool Kit (4.2) and Encina (2.5).
- Coming Soon, TXSeries
(30th June 1998)
- IBM have announced TXSeries General Availability and given a range of dates for
the various supported platforms (also given below). TXSeries is a
bundled version of the latest Encina and CICS. So that all the
numbers match up its version number starts as 4.2. The announcement of
TXSeries means that responsibility for CICS based on the Encina Tool
Kit has now formally passed to Transarc, the IBM subsidiary that had
produced Encina.
Those dates are July 10th for AIX and Solaris and October 16th for
Windows NT and HP-UX.
- Updates on Iceberg and Top End
(20th June 1998)
- BEA Systems have now confirmed that they have completed the purchase of
Top End from NCR. They've done this following an apparently successful
issue of shares, which presumably partially funded this exercise.
Iceberg has now been officially launched and given the inspiring name
of M3.
- BEA to Buy Top End
(25th May 1998)
- BEA Systems have (at least on their French Web Site) announced that they
are to acquire rival TP Monitor Top End from NCR. According to the
press release Top End will eventually be integrated with BEA's own
TPM, Tuxedo, but for now Top End will continue to be supported as a
separate entity. The deal values Top End at around $55 million,
although it is not clear how this will be financed.
- Iceberg Rolls Out
(20th May 1998)
- BEA Systems's OTM, code named Iceberg, looks set for a 5th June 1998
launch. So far, commercially, only Encina have had an Object Transaction
Server in the market (and then officially only a beta). Iceberg's entry
will herald more competition in this growing area.
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