Scripting Languages at the Oracle Tuxedo Virtual Developer Day: Review
On Tuesday I participated as a student in the first Oracle Tuxedo
Virtual Developer Day. The VDD will be repeated
in various timezones & languages as shown on the schedule.
I was particularly interested because Tuxedo now allows clients and
services to be written in Python and Ruby. These can interact with
any other clients and services, making it easy to integrate
applications and bring new functionality up quickly. Tuxedo becomes a
powerful application server for the scripting user, letting you code
in languages you like. The scalability of Tuxedo is almost linear and
the availability is fantastic. Customers report years of
uptime. Combine these benefits with management and monitoring
capabilities and I can see why Tuxedo is so popular for serious
application deployment.
I'd had some involvement with the scripting language section of the
VDD but I hadn't seen the hands on lab material. I was also
interested in how the third-party presentation website infrastructure
worked in practice. [The particular infrastructure used was, err,
"interesting" in its stretching of a real life conference metaphor.
But the video and audio worked great, which was the important
thing].
Todd Little started the general Tuxedo keynote promptly and
discussed Tuxedo features. Next, Deepak Goel spoke about using Tuxedo
as the application server for scripting languges. You get to use your
normal development environment, frameworks, APIs etc. Your
application can be extended to provide or use existing services. The
clustering of Tuxedo eliminates single points of failure, and you get
access to Tuxedo's resource multiplexing capabilities, not to mention
management and monitoring functionality.
Tuxedo is a great way to integrate existing applications into a
reliable, managed environment. It's worth checking out.
Once the presentations were finished, I started the hands-on-lab
material. For this, the web presentation infrastructure was used only
for online chats. Students could run the self-paced hands-on-labs on
a free, hosted Rackspace machine or by running Oracle VirtualBox
locally. I'm a VirtualBox user so I did the latter. VirtualBox is
easy: Install the free VirtualBox software, download the lab files and
hey-presto it booted up a whole new, preconfigured Linux machine.
Magic if you haven't used a virtual machine before, which will soon be
none of us. One little VirtualBox trick is the right-hand control
key. This configurably toggles capture of the cursor in the VB
window. Also, Right-Control-F toggles full screen mode.
I began with the Tuxedo Python lab. The lab neatly and clearly
showed how Python could be used to provide and consume services within
the Tuxedo infrastructure. While following the steps, I made a one
character typo in one file, and I also forgot to set my environment in
a second shell I opened. The resulting issues took me a short while
to resolve as I tracked through the error messages. It was, of
course, a good learning experience (and a reminder about structuring
the OpenWorld labs I'm involved in creating). There was no problem
finishing the Python lab in good time, which let me go onto the other
labs, including one showing off some of Tuxedo's monitoring
features.
If you can't attend any of the Tuxedo VDDs, come along to their
hands-on-labs at Oracle Open World. The Tuxedo team lists their
sessions here - I'm looking forward to that PHP lab!
An interesting Tuxedo whitepaper is SCA: Bringing Modern SOA Programming to Tuxedo
Other relevant Tuxedo references:
