What is Tiera Back Office Server?

Tiera Back Office Server  (TBOS) is a multithreaded application server development system. TBOS allows developers to take existing 2-tier (client-server) Java  applications, applets, beans, EJB beans and C/C++ code and re-deploy them in a multi-tier distributed environment. TBOS insulates the developer from the complexity of building distributed transaction-based systems. This allows developers to focus on building the business logic only and not building the entire server infrastructure, decreasing the time-to-market and risk for building these types of systems.

TBOS automatically adds thread, session, memory, console, log, performance, JDBC connection, transaction and system management capabilities to the developed business process objects. The developed applications are specifically designed for e-commerce and mobile applications.

TBOS is a natively compiled container that houses the business process objects written in Java and C++.  TBOS can be extended to add business process objects in any language. The TBOS server is a high performance, highly scalable, distributed, transaction based and secure system.

The TBOS is accessed from an  "extremely thin" client . TBOS client applications can be written in Java or C++. TBOS client applications can run on Windows (95,98, NT and 2000) and any java enabled platform, including hand held devices.  TBOS provides an object browser to dynamically create, manipulate and destroy TBOS business process objects, so that developers and administrators can easily view objects under TBOS’s control. 

TBOS uses a repository to help the developers and system administrators keep a complete inventory of all TBOS business process objects and server configurations. Administrators use the repository to define security policies for all business process objects that have been imported into the repository. The entire develoment, administration, and deployment environments are completely graphically based.

TBOS is an open system that inter-operates with CORBA and COM architectures and can utilize CORBA and COM services.

TBOS has a centralized management console that provides a global view of all TBOS severs deployed through the enterprise. 

TBOS can managed by Network management systems such as HP OpenView,  CA-Unicenter, and Tivoli.

Why would you use TBOS? 

The founders of Tiera had spent several years evaluating and building industrial strength e-commerce applications and came across some serious problems using existing "out of the box" technology. Below are just a few.

(1)     The existing technology of building web sites (CGI, Active Server Pages, etc) were very easy to implement, but were no more than client server applications. These applications would not scale to thousands of users. They were not transaction based.

(2)     The newer technology alternatives, such as CORBA, are extremely complex and very unstable. There is not a lot of people in the workforce that know how to effectively use this new technology. It also was unlikely, due to very slow industry adoption, that this situation would radically change in the upcoming years. Also, these newer technology alternatives had limited integration with existing back office systems. You almost have start from scratch. 

(3)     These new technology alternatives, were very expensive to deploy. The more popular ORB vendors require a lot of capital investment for development seats, and want a percentage of the value of the deployed product. It is not good business sense to agree to this type of arrangement. Why would anybody want to give up a significant percentage of your revenue for a piece of middleware that adds very little value to the end deliverable. It might provide technical value, but not much business value to the end buyer.

 (4)     Most technology choices were incomplete. They did not have all the capabilities that were required to deploy the system in a production environment.

This prompted the founders to build a comprehensive server technology that was based on the following requirements.

(1)     The developer should not be concerned with the complexity of building distributed applications for the Internet. They should be focused on solving the business's problems, not building the infrastructure. Since the majority of the required infrastructure is the  same for almost all applications, it should be built in.

(2)     Companies should be able to use their existing staff to build these applications. They should not have to employ a large additional staff to build these new systems, even if they could find them.

(3)     The system should be able to easily integrate existing back office systems. Not only the data, but the applications that house the logic that process the data as well.

(4)     The system should be a completely maintainable and manageable production level system.

(5)     The system should be able to inter-operate with other systems based on industry standards

Who  would use TBOS?

• Companies wanting to preserve their current investment in existing 2-tier client-server systems developed in Java, C/C++, and other legacy languages and deploy them on the Intranet, Internet, or hand held devices without re-writing them in their entirety.

• Companies building new systems that are looking for maximum scalability of their system, where the system is based on Java, C++, XML business objects and thin clients and then deploy them on the Intranet, Internet, or hand held devices.

• Companies that have existing products that they would like to extend by add Java/C++ business objects/scripting to their product.

• Companies that have existing products that they would like Internet enable, without having to re-write them from scratch.

• Companies who need to quickly build industrial strength Intranet, Internet, or hand held device applications, but do not have the core competency in Java, CORBA, distributed transactions, etc.