Privately-held cross system software tools firm Talarian Corp, Mountain View, California, has a new release of its SmartSockets rapid application development tool kit, adding security, new middleware protocols and dynamic reconfiguration of routing tables. Talarian claims SmartSockets now includes hierarchical name-spacing, dynamic routing of messages and recovery from transient network failures similar to techniques used by the Internet. SmartSockets encrypts messages and enforces authentication of programs and users. Users can customize applications by adding their own network protocols, the company says. SmartSockets 4.0 enables processes to communicate across different operating systems, through the use of messages. The communicating processes can reside on the same machine, on a local network, on a wide area network, or anywhere on the Internet, says Talarian. It is pushing its stuff as an industrial-strength package for taking care of network interfaces, guaranteeing delivery of messages, handling communication protocols and for dealing with recovery after system or network failures. Components include a SmartSockets application programming interface for communicating between processes and monitoring distributed applications, a C++ library providing an object-oriented layer on top of standard SmartSockets services, a message router enabling applications to use a publish-subscribe communications model, an interface for monitoring and debugging distributed applications, re-usable message types and a bunch of C and C++ programs to set the user on their way. It claims it is the only messaging product that includes C application programming interface and C++ class library. SmartSockets supports several communicat ion paradigms including publish-subscribe, peer-to-peer and Remote Procedure Call. Included as part of the package are graphical tools for monitoring and debugging applications. SmartSockets is available on most Unixes, OpenVMS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, and OS/2. SmartSockets is also included in the company’s RTworks family of modular, stand-alone software tools for building high-performance real-time scientific and technical applications. RTworks 3.5 includes automatic failover, non-stop maintenance for round-the-clock operations and a Motif context sensitive development environment. The family includes RTie, a rule-based technology for high-speed data analysis, RThci, a dynamic graphical user interface builder that requires no coding, SmartSockets, RTdaq, a data acquisition interface to external data sources, RTarchive, its high-speed data storage utility and RTplayback data playback utility. It is up under most Unixes and selected modules run under NT and Windows 3.1 and Windows95. The company has recently signed up for the Message Oriented Middleware Association. Customers include British Telecommunications Plc, IBM Corp, Lockheed Martin Corp, Loral Corp, MCI Communications Inc, the National Aeronautics & Space Administration, Northern Telecom Ltd and Pacific Bell Inc. SmartSockets 4.0 ships in September and prices go from $16,000 for a developers seat on Unix with 20 connections.
