Independence Technologies Inc, Fremont, California, has developed a version of its iTRAN distributed systems development environment for use with Personal Digital Assistants. Independence designed iTRAN for the handheld computing and communicating devices to accomodate their memory and processing power limitations. To enable the Personal Digital Assistant, or comparable device, to maintain the necessary uninterrupted teleprocessing link, Independence has moved most of the client transaction logic to the server, with a proxy. The product is designed to integrate a variety of client products, including laptop computers, personal organisers and digital television set-top boxes, into transaction processing systems. McLean, Virginia-based integrator HFS Inc, working with iTRAN, confirms that the product talks to Top End from AT&T Global Information Solutions, Tuxedo from Novell Inc and Encina from Transarc Corp. The iTRAN environment, around which iTRAN for Personal Digital Ass-istants is built, aims at improving transaction processing monitor performance by reducing the amount of data communicated and its frequency. It uses ANSI-C to specify a high-level teleprocessing control logic, which the transaction controller uses to minimise the number of times server processes need to communicate to accomplish a given transaction. To reduce the amount of data flowing between servers, its Request Common Data Block storage mechanism stores transaction states for inter-process communication. iTRAN provides modules for distributed runtime services, performance and process monitoring, logging, event management and database authorisation. The performance monitor tracks applications at the level of business operations, rather than programming language procedures. Transaction processing application performance can be measured through Independence’s applications management software, iVIEW, that sits on top of iTRAN. Based on the SNMP protocol, iVIEW can be used for network and system management, which can both then be placed on a single monitor. The performance monitor support included in iTRAN provides an applications programming interface that measures time spent in user-defined computations. Data is collected and can then be routed back to a back-end server. Vice-president of marketing Mike Zivkovic says the client-server architected iTRAN uses a different style of transaction authorisation than even do existing teleprocessing systems. We make security available at business function level, such as saying ‘Users in this region can do this function between these hours’. It is not just based on particular tables in a database, but may involve other systems and calls to other services.
