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 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.

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.