Hitachi Software Ltd has announced the availability of TPBroker, which it claims is the first combination of a transaction processing monitor and an object request broker. It says it developed the Corba 2.0-compliant request broker with a little help from Visigenic Software Inc, and the transaction monitor is an extension of Hitachi’s own OpenTP1. Visigenic itself got the request broker technology via its acquisition of PostModern Computing Inc in April last year (CI No 2,903). TPBroker – which supports HP-UX, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris and Windows NT on the server side, and these plus Widows 95 on the client side, is said to enable developers to deploy versatile and mission critical applications for the Internet and intranets. It currently supports development in C++ or the company’s own ObjectIQ, and other application development tools can be used if they are Corba 2.0 compliant, though none are actually certified compliant yet. Java and ActiveX support, as well as further Unix flavors, should be announced in the next few months. The company says TPBroker offers operation and administration features for system administrators. The middleware also handles transaction activation and termination, automatic reactivation and recovery of suspended transactions, and in the event of system failure two-phase commit and rollback – to ensure consistency across distributed databases. Unlike Encina and Iona’s respective competitive offerings, Hitachi Software claims TPBroker is designed for distributed processing from the outset, offers fault tolerance and load balancing, and combines Object Request Broker with a Transaction Processing monitor. Fault tolerance is said to be possible through use of a smart agent, which duplicates object services and manages failure of individual servers. Pricing dependent on configuration.
