Transoft Developers

TCA 3.31 is now released.  Headline features are:

.NET Proxies are now Serializable

This means that the Proxy objects may be stored in an ASP.NET session even when running as part of a Web Farm or Web Garden (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178586.aspx for details) .

Component Broker supports up to 10000 connections under UNIX

The broker will attempt to allocate up to 10000 connections on UNIX systems (this may be limited according to kernel parameters).  When LogLevel=1 is in effect, a message showing how many connections are available will be logged:

30/Sep/2008 10:09:46 Requesting 10240 fds.  10240 Client connections available (pid = 24315, tid = 0)

TCA Monitor shows service parameters

A list of service parameters may be obtained by right-clicking on the service in the monitor:

TCA Monitor

Make HTTP Requests from Javascript Adapter

It’s now possible to make HTTP GET and POST calls from the Javascript adapter

The TCA 3.30 and TDS 3.30 releases are now available.

Features of this release:

Web-based Administrator

TCA brokers may now be administered via a web interface. To start the administrator, select the ‘Start Web Administrator’ option (Windows) or run $TCA_INSTALL_DIR/webadmin/webadmin.sh (UNIX). By default, the web server listens on port 8111. Access the web server at http://example-server:8111/

.NET Proxy with support for data binding

The original .NET proxy tcadotnet.dll remains, however, a new .NET 2.0 DLL, Transoft.Tca.dll has been developed, which adds data binding functionality. To generate code that makes use of the new proxy, include the languages CS, VB_Net or JScript to generate C#, VB.NET or JScript.NET. In addition to proxy DLLs, the development suite will also generate a WinForms application that uses data binding to communicate with the proxy.

Create Process as Console User on Windows Vista

Windows Vista contains new security features preventing Local System services from accessing the Console. For further information, refer to the Microsoft web site.
When developing components, however, this can be an awkward feature, particularly when making use of Micro Focus COBOL’s CBL_DBGBREAK call to invoke the debugger.
To work around this, the Component Broker has been modified so that it may run components in the context of the logged-on console user. To enable this, a registry setting must be modified. Under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Transoft\TCF_Server\<tcf_instance_name>, the key ComponentOnConsole should be set to ‘Y’.

Server and Connection statistics recording

The Component Broker has new features to record statistics pertaining to connections and service calls.

The statistics recording facility can be started and stopped using the tcastats command.
To analyse the collected statistics, use the statdump command.

Data recorded for general stats:

• Shared memory allocated (bytes)
• Total socket connections
• Number of services currently executing
• Number of components active
• Total service calls

Data recorded for service stats:

• Service name
• Time started
• Time taken to execute
• Client ID
• Client IP Address
• Client port
• Time queued
• Context buffer (first 16 bytes of)

Stop/Restart all components

It is possible to halt all components with the cbctl tool. Services executed while components are stopped will be returned an error. Components can also be restarted using cbctl.

The TCA 3.30 release notice and the latest product documentation can be downloaded from the TCA extras FTP site.