Getting Started with Oracle Tuxedo: This is a crash course in developing distributed systems using Tuxedo and extending it to an SOA or cloud environment. Get to grips with administrative tools, Tuxedo APIs, the SALT component, and the Exalogic machine.

In this section, we will discuss the elements of the Tuxedo administration, such as the role of an administrator, how to configure and structure a Tuxedo application, various useful commands, how to manage or monitor a Tuxedo application, some important built-in features of Tuxedo, components such as queue and domain, and tuning guidelines.

The Tuxedo configuration file, also called the UBBCONFIG file, is the most important configuration file for a Tuxedo environment or application. The UBBCONFIG file is a text file that contains various sections to structure your application, and each section has parameters with respective values to configure and manage the Tuxedo application. It has eight sections, of which five sections are required for all configurations: RESOURCES, MACHINES, GROUPS, SERVERS, and SERVICES; the rest of the sections (NETGROUPS, NETWORK, and ROUTING) are optional. This is a text file, so it can be created or maintained using any text editor that works with a text file.

Let's see an example of the UBBCONFIG file to show the overall structure of a Tuxedo application.

The following UBBCONFIG file shows the two-machine (MP mode) configuration along with the most important parameters. I have added the NETWORK and ROUTING sections to give you a real-life example:

*RESOURCE...

There are a huge number (around 100) of commands with various options to administrate a Tuxedo system. I have listed all the commands in this section and picked up the most important ones to discuss in brief.

buildclient [-v] [{-r rmname | -w }][ -o name]  [ -f firstfiles] [ -l lastfiles]  

The administrator needs to be able to constantly monitor and tune parameters, add or remove a user, deploy or undeploy an application, and create or change queues, access control lists, and so on. The Tuxedo MIB contains all the information needed for the operation of an Oracle Tuxedo application. There are two different administrative tools that access the MIB and allow for dynamic configuration of a Tuxedo application. The third one is the Tuxedo Admin Console, which has not been updated since Tuxedo 8, and hence it is not included in our discussion.

The following is a list of the MIB's components:

In this section, we will discuss various important built-in features (security, data-dependent routing, encryption, and so on) that come with the Tuxedo system and how these features can be used to make your application more secure, effective, and responsive to address your business needs. These features are configurable, and there is no need to do any custom development, hence they are very cost-effective and easy to use.

Tuxedo provides a reliable queue based on the XA-compliant resource manager (TMS – Transaction Manager Server), which provides the framework to store messages in a reliable storage and forward it to different components. These could be services, clients, or components within different Tuxedo processes. The purpose of a queue is to perform time-independent communication. Any client or server can store onto (enqueue) and retrieve (dequeue) a message from the queue. Tuxedo provides the TMQUEUE server, which provides this enqeuing and dequing service.

Tuxedo also provides a server called TMQFORWARD, which dequeues a message and forwards it to other services. Messages can be retrieved in any of several ordering schemes, including Last In, First Out (LIFO), First In, First Out (FIFO), priority order, and time-based order. More than one client or server can access the same queue. In Chapter 3, Development of Tuxedo – Various APIs, I have discussed the Tuxedo queue...

The Tuxedo domain can be used for large-federated or distributed-application architecture across cities, countries, or different parts of the world. The Tuxedo domain facilitates interoperate or extend the scope of various applications to include access to other Tuxedo and non-Tuxedo-based applications. The Tuxedo domain provides transparency between applications to ensure that any client can get services from another domain (remote service) by maintaining the security norms. The Tuxedo administrator can define/design different domains based on the geographical location of the data center or to enforce inter-organizational boundaries. The Tuxedo domains are autonomous, which means they are administered independently of each other. Domains are defined by the administrator; he/she defines how the services in one domain are made available to another. There are basically three components for the Tuxedo domain architecture: DoMain Administrative server (DMADM), GateWay Administrative...

Planning the architecture of a Tuxedo system is a very important and critical task, as there are a number of components that have various parameters that can impact performance, scalability, reliability, and security. There are basically two major areas we need to look at: modularity (which makes applications more manageable), and agile and resource management (which means sharing common resources to reduce maintenance, that is, time and cost). As an administrator, you need to keep these two in mind, and you don't need to predefine the application configuration all at once. The initial/default values for parameters in UBBCONFIG usually provide acceptable/standard performance in most cases. If the performance, measured by response time, is not as high as required, the administrator should monitor the system to determine the bottleneck and change parameters as necessary. I am sharing some practical experiences with you, which are very common, but critical for a Tuxedo...

In this chapter, we discussed various components of a Tuxedo application from the administrative perspective. I explained the configuration file and its structure and the relevance of its parameters. I have listed all the Tuxedo commands and how to monitor a Tuxedo application using these commands and TSAM's web-based GUI interface. I have also explained the Tuxedo queue and the reliable-messaging mechanism and how to create and administer it. The Tuxedo domain is another important component that can be used for real-time distributed applications spread across geographical and organizational boundaries. We discussed various built-in features of Tuxedo (for example, load balancing and data-dependent routing) that make Tuxedo more robust, scalable, and easy to use. Each of these sections itself is a vast topic, and a book can be written on each of them. The intention of this book is to give you a quick overview of each of these important components of Tuxedo. In the end, we discussed...