Retix Inc, Santa Monica, California says it has developed an Open Systems Interconnection compliant distributed transaction processing communications manager, which enables different transaction processing monitors to communicate and interoperate with each other. Transarc Corp, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has signed for the software and together with Retix will integrate it with the Encina transaction monitor it markets. IBM Corp, whose CICS/6000 transaction monitor is based on Encina, will buy a licence to the software once the integration work is complete. The three firms say they will demonstrate the stuff running on RS/6000s this year. Other transaction processing monitor vendors – NCR Corp and Unix System Laboratories Inc – have also licensed parts of the Retix software, but are doing their own integration work, which will leave them some six months behind Transarc, says Retix. An official at Retix said if these companies had taken the entire product, the industry would have seen transaction processing interoperability a lot earlier. Retix OSI/DTP is designed to provide transaction protocol services for peer-to-peer communication between transaction monitors and the transaction application they manage. Retix says its OSI/DTP software strips application data of its Encina, Top End, Tuxedo and other monitor-specific features and recompiles it for the target environment. OSI/DTP conforms to X/Open Co Ltd’s Distributed Transaction Processing model and the Open Systems Interconnection Application Layer Structure. The X/Open standard provides portability, the seven layer model the interoperability, Retix says. OSI/DTP embraces atomisity preventing transaction operations from being split; concurrency – which keeps all transactions together when passed across the network, and monitor manager – which controls the transactions.
