Book Review: The TUXEDO System: Software for Constructing and Managing Distributed Business Applications by Andrade et al

The TUXEDO System: Software for Constructing and Managing Distributed Business Applications
Juan M. Andrade, Mark Carges, Terence Dwyer, Stephen Felts


1996, 496 pages
ISBN-10: 0201634937
ISBN-13: 978-0201634938



I regret that I only first read this book just a few months ago. As a long time employee of BEA (owner of Tuxedo), I should have gotten to it much sooner. But, that's how it went for me. I was aware of Tuxedo at a casual level before reading this book. I was also well acquainted with J2EE, which gave me an interesting perspective on this technology.

Main Concepts

This section describes the highlights of the technology. I am going to assume a J2EE frame of reference because that was mine when I read it:

• Tuxedo is a legendary piece of software. Many mission critical applications like real time banking and life critical applications run on Tuxedo. If there are computers deployed in an underground bunker, chances are that they are running Tuxedo. Tuxedo was developed primarily in the 80's and early 90's.
  
• Most of the capabilities of J2EE (developed in the late 90's/early 2000's) are also found in Tuxedo.
• Tuxedo provides platform independence to C programmers. Tuxedo handles network code, portable data structures (buffers), and byte order problems experienced when messaging between different computer architectures.
• The core concept in Tuxedo is that of a service. A service is written and deployed to one of the Tuxedo servers.
• Clients call services via a synchronous or asynchronous Tuxedo API call. The client passed a buffer that contains the parameters. Depending on configuration, the call may pass the transactional context.
• Tuxedo service invocation is internally brokered via message queues. This is the key to its scalability. The queues provide a natural throttling of inbound requests, and can be done without blocking the client (if async is used).

Review

Summary: I highly recommend this book for developers/architects of systems that need to scale. Tuxedo initiated and/or popularized many great ideas for building scalable, fault-tolerant enterprise systems. Even if you won't work with Tuxedo, and plan to use J2EE, it is helpful to understand the history of the technology in which you work.

Details: This is the part where I'd normally nitpick the issues I found with the book. Didn't find any - I think its good!