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Oracle Tuxedo is an open system transaction processor (TP).

It supports both COBOL and C/C++ applications, as well as Ruby and Python.

Tuxedo is a transaction processing system or transaction-oriented middleware, comparable to IBM’s MQ and designed for high availability and to provide scalable applications.

It can perform a lot of transactions per second on commonly available distributed systems. Originally, it was developed and designed by AT&T telephone company to act as an online transaction processing (OLTP) system.

Tuxedo uses the technique of message routing and queuing these messages into its system. Message requests are sent to Tuxedo named services and then it uses memory-based communication to queue the requests to Tuxedo servers.

The requester is unaware of where the server that actually processes the request is located or how it is implemented, so this is an asynchronous request.

This is, in fact, the principle of how SOA is implemented in nowaday’s modern systems before even the concept of SOA was familiar to any one.

In 2008, Oracle acquired BEA and for a long time it seemed undetermined what Oracle would do with this Tuxedo systems.

Although a quite unknown software product, large bank messaging systems such as the International Bank Transfers Systems (SWIFT) uses Tuxedo for message processing Oracle Tuxedo 12c will be part of the new Exabus stack, a component embedded in the Exalogic solution Oracle launched earlier.

Tuxedo’s migration abilities such as workbench tools for the migration process are integrated in Eclipse, so developers can migrate mainframe CICS resources and COBOL copybooks to the Oracle platform. In general, you can say that Tuxedo in Exalogic is meant to migrate non-Java applications (especially Mainframe applications).

Tuxedo in the Oracle version

The structure of Tuxedo consists of the following components:

• Communication concentrators: For remote clients (Java, CORBA, or Web Services).

• Gateways: To facilitate the sharing of services across domains, Tuxedo provides domain gateways. • Failure recovery: Each machine monitors the state of all servers and can automatically restart failed servers.

• Transaction monitoring and coordination: Tuxedo applications can make use of the transactions (to databases or other subsystems) to be controlled by the application or automatically controlled by the Tuxedo configuration, that is, container controlled transactions.

• Queuing subsystem: Tuxedo uses a queuing subsystem called /Q. This facility provides transient and persistent queues.

You can compare these with other messaging queuing products like JMS or MQ.

Oracle Tuxedo’s new or enhanced features

• Mainframe re-hosting: To migrate the C/C++ and COBOL applications.

• SALT: For web services, SOAP/HTTP(S) gateway and for developing SCA based applications in C++, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Supports modules for Apache Web Server, Oracle HTTP Server, and Oracle iPlanet Web Server.

• Tuxedo Mainframe Adapters (TMA): This provides a set of processes that run on Tuxedo that communicate with a mainframe.

• JCA Adapter: This is a wrapper to WebLogic Tuxedo Connector (WTC) as part of WebLogic Server.

WTC can only be used on WebLogic, but the JCA adapter allows deploying WTC capabilities on other Java Apps Servers that support JAVA EE JCA.