Transaction Processing Monitors are systems designed and developed in the 1970s and 1980s to support a large number of airline terminals from a single system or computer. It was developed for building complex transaction processing systems with a large number of clients and servers.
Transaction Processing Monitors acts as middlewares (middleware is software that helps and bridges a variety of communication/connectivity between two or more applications) its main task is to support and handle interactions between applications on a variety of computer platforms.
Transaction Processing Monitors is also usually known as TP-monitors which provides functionalities such as managing, deploying, and developing transactional distributed information systems. It controls programs that monitor or manage a transaction of data as it passes from one stage in a process to another in an organized transaction-oriented manner.
A transaction monitor can be used in various system components such as communication systems, and operating systems for transaction-protected applications. It provides an operating system on top of the existing operating system that connects thousands of computers with a pool of shared server processes in real-time.
One of the oldest forms of middleware is from IBM which was made to provide rich runtime environments for online Transaction Processing applications. Then newer versions of tp monitors came and made work on client-server based they were best at that time and they are still relevant in today’s world such as processing of banking transactions.
Features:
- It provides the ease to create user interfaces.
- It unwraps the incoming content/data into data packets.
- It provides a continuous row/queue of client requests and responses from the server.
- It routes the client data to servers.
- It gives secure returns to services.
- It hides inner transmission details from programmers.
- Helps in maintaining the load of the program.
Working:
Working of TPM
- Incoming messages go from the queue manager or input queue as shown in the diagram above.
- The durability of the lineup of outgoing information is crucial thus the application server sends a confirmation message to the output queue as part of a transaction.
- Once the transaction completes, the TP monitor guarantees message is perfectly delivered.
- Many TP monitors have locking and recovery facilities to let application servers implement ACID properties by themselves.
Components:
- Monitor: It provides a rendering environment that helps in providing security and fast response time to the system. It is comprised of different tools for the installation of components.
- Communication services: This includes protocols and mechanisms to the system that helps in continuing messages and peer-to-peer communication.
- Transactional RPC: Provides a basic relational mechanism.
- Transactional services: It provides support for concurrency control, recovery, and transactional programming.
Functions:
- Message Manager
- Request control
- Application Servers
- Process Management
- Inter-Process Communication
- Queuing communications
- System Management and Recovery
- TP monitors also can perform system management functions related to accounting and security
Benefits:
- TP-Monitors acts as a development platform for applications that run on multiple computers.
- Its software allows the running of TP programs.
- Lines up as a model of middleware in itself (i.e. Message Oriented Middleware)
- Helps to tackle the cycle of events at once without any interruption
- Helps in providing the interface between the input device and DBMS systems.
- It provides user data security and establishes the transactions in a way that they do not get manipulated.