Enterprise JavaBeans, Third Edition

Component Transaction Monitors

The CTM industry grew out of both the ORB and TP monitor industries. The CTM is really a hybrid of these two technologies that provides a powerful, robust distributed object platform. To better understand what a CTM is, we will examine the strengths and weakness of TP monitors and ORBs.

Transaction Processing Monitors

Transaction processing (TP) monitors have been evolving for about 30 years (CICS, the Customer Information Control System, was introduced in 1968) and have become powerful, high-speed server platforms for mission-critical applications. Some TP products, such as CICS and TUXEDO, may be familiar to you. TP monitors are operating systems for business applications written in languages such as COBOL. It may seem strange to call a TP monitor an “operating system,” but because it controls an application’s entire environment, it’s a fitting description. TP monitor systems automatically manage the entire environment in which a business application runs, including transactions, resource management, and fault tolerance. The business applications that run in TP monitors are written in procedural programming languages (e.g., COBOL and C) that are often accessed through network messaging or remote procedure calls (RPCs). Messaging allows a client to send a message to a TP monitor requesting that some application be run with certain parameters. It’s similar in concept to the Java event model. Messaging can be synchronous or asynchronous, meaning ...