ASP.NET StarterForms in TCA 3.40
June 30, 2010 at 11:46 am | Posted in TCA, Transoft Products | Comments OffTags: .NET, ASP.NET, TCA, TCA 3.40
A new proxy type has been added to TCA 3.40, CSHARPASP. It is designed to be used in conjunction with the standard CSHARP proxy:
application simple (CSHARP, CSHARPASP, MFCOBOL)
The proxy will generate ASP.NET pages for each service in the TCA application for testing purposes, or as the basis for a web application
Using Browser-hosted rich-client apps with TCA 3.40
June 30, 2010 at 11:30 am | Posted in TCA, Transoft Products | Comments OffTags: .NET, Silverlight, TCA, TCA 3.40, WPF
TCA 3.40 introduces support for WPF-Browser applications and Silverlight applications.
Both these rich-client environments are sandboxed, so they can only make calls back to their originating web server. To access TCA, a handler has been developed to pass HTTP requests from the web server to the Component Broker.
Web Site Configuration
The TCA proxy DLL now includes an HTTP handler that forwards requests to a Component Broker. This is configured with the web.config file.
WPF Browser Applications
The Browser applications are simply .NET applications, and are developed using the same C# proxies. Hence a desktop application should be able to share code with a browser-hosted application.
The only difference between a desktop application and a browser-based application is that the desktop app connects to a URL rather than a host/port.
Silverlight Applications
Silverlight uses a restricted .NET framework, so code may not be 100% compatible with a desktop WPF application. The main difference is that a Silverlight application does not support synchronous calls. A new method, BeginExecute has been added to the TCA proxy to support asynchronous callbacks.
Unicode Support in TCA
June 30, 2010 at 10:30 am | Posted in TCA, Transoft Products | Comments OffTags: .NET, cobol, Java, TCA, TCA 3.40, Unicode
TCA 3.40 introduces unicode support for MF COBOL components, C components and Java and .NET proxies.
Unicode strings are specified with the nchar type in SDL:
service usimple.ureverse
(
input_string nchar (50) in progid 'W-INSTR',
output_string nchar (50) out progid 'W-OUTSTR',
)
MF COBOL Components
MF COBOL components generate N(x) fields from the nchar paramerters:
01 w-tcf-ureverse-in.
03 input-string pic N(50).
MF COBOL Unicode handling is influenced by two directives. The first specifies UTF-16 byte order. TCA expects the native byte-order. The second specifies the use of UTF-16, rather than DBCS:
$set unicode(native)
$set nsymbol(national)
Java, .NET
These support Unicode natively. There should be no special considerations here, except for using the latest TCA proxy libraries.
New features in TCA 3.40
February 3, 2010 at 3:57 pm | Posted in TCA, Transoft Products | Comments OffTags: Silverlight, TCA, Unicode
TCA 3.40 will contain the following new features:
- Define services to map to COBOL entry points within SDL – no code changes required
- Unicode support for Java, .NET and MF COBOL adapters. New SDL type nchar added to handle this
- Web server component to forward TCA requests to a Component Broker. This will enable support for use of existing TCA proxy code through Silverlight or WPF Browser apps
- Starter forms for ASP.NET
New WSDL format for TCA
October 13, 2009 at 11:27 am | Posted in TCA, Transoft Products | Comments OffTags: Axis, Axis2, Crystal Reports, SOAP, TCA, Web Services, WSDL
Back when TCA SOAP support was implemented, the most common SOAP format was the rpc/encoded. At that time, Java implementations were the most common client for SOAP.
As time has moved on, the .NET framework has dominated the Web Services landscape. By default, .NET uses the document/literal style (although it happily interoperates with rpc/encoded)
Now the latest Java libraries have dropped support for rpc/encoded (Apache Axis2 – see http://ws.apache.org/axis2/1_1_1/Axis2-rpc-support.html). Attempting to use Axis2 to read the TCA WSDL will fail with an exception stating : “Encoded use is not supported”. Obviously this will cause problems with any software built on Axis2, such as Crystal Reports.
To address this, TCA has been modified to support the wrapped document/literal format (described here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-whichwsdl/). The modifications come as an updated .mac file for the Transoft Development Suite and as a modified Component Broker.
The changes will be part of the next release, but in the meantime if you find yourself needing to interoperate with a SOAP framework that doesn’t support rpc/encoded, contact customer services and we can supply an update
TCA 3.31 Released
November 14, 2008 at 1:45 pm | Posted in TCA | Comments OffTCA 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:
Make HTTP Requests from Javascript Adapter
It’s now possible to make HTTP GET and POST calls from the Javascript adapter
Release: TCA 3.30 and TDS 3.30
June 9, 2008 at 11:14 am | Posted in TCA | Comments OffThe 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.
Vista enhancements for TCA 3.30 – CreateProcessAsUser
June 3, 2008 at 2:28 pm | Posted in TCA | Comments OffTags: cobol, TCA, vista
Under Vista, Microsoft has added a new security feature, “Service hardening” includes a number of modifications to windows services. This impacts on the TCA Component Broker.
One aspect of this is “Session 0 isolation“. This means that services are unable to interact with the desktop in the manner that was available under XP (there is the strangley named ‘Interactive Service Detection Service’, but microsoft’s intention is to do away with this at an unspecified date).
Under normal usage, there is no requirement for a service to interact with the desktop, but when debugging components, it may be necessary to interact. One example is the MicroFocus COBOL call CBL_DBGBREAK. This call will invoke the debugger from a running program.
To enable the use of debugging features such as this, TCA 3.30 has been modified so that when a registry setting is in effect, it will create components with the CreateProcessAsUser call instead of the CreateProcess call. The setting is the string value ComponentOnConsole under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Transoft\TCF_Server\<tcf_server_name>.
Once this setting is in effect, new components will be created in the context of the logged-on console user, rather than the service user for the Component Broker (note that unfortunately, this means that the debugging features will only be available at the console, and not available via a Terminal Services session)
Remember this is a debugging feature, and should not be used in production environments.
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