XOTS Features and the Future of XOTS

It is our goal to provide a compliant and interoperable implementation of the OTS spec with respect to version 1.2. Low latency and high throughput will be primary goals for the design and implementation of xots.
While the xots developers are working hard towards that goal, xots already does have some interesting features ready - as much as an alpha version can be "ready".

  • xots supports implicit context propagation. Although explicit context propagation is also possible, we strongly discourage the use thereof.
  • xots supports direct and indirect context management.
  • xots supports lightweight clients with external tx coordination,
  • interposed tx clients with internal tx coordination and interposed tx servers.
  • xots provides a basic xa adapter and database integration framework to include X/Open DTP XA compliant resource managers in xots managed transactions. There are running examples for writing CORBA server implementations using embedded SQL to access an Oracle8 as well as an Informix IUS database.
  • xots is fully multithreaded

The Future of XOTS
  • Administration and Monitoring Service (AMS), probably using NOS and web-based interfaces is on the TODO list.
  • Interpretability with other CORBA OTS compliant service implementations is an open issue and on the TODO list.
  • A persistence framework is on the TODO list.
  • xots as a basis for JTS might be a good idea.
  • Nested transactions are not supported.
  • There are other, more loosely coupled, advanced transaction processing models that we might look into. XOTS currently does not provide much support for such advanced transaction models, but xots does not exclude to incorporate such features in the future. Indeed, research work such as CheeTah , Dependency-Spheres , X2TS is targeted to provide extended transaction processing, either for component based systems or messaging oriented systems. Features thereof, not excluding the CORBA Activity Service, are feasible to be incorporated into xots.
  • There is no support for other TP protols such as LU6.2, OSI-TP and APIs such as TxRPC, CPIC etc.