Humankind has gotten more comfortable with computers over the years, and I’m convinced that this has less to do with operating systems and Killer Apps than it does with simple, caveman-type responses to concepts of Scale.

The Number One most terrifying concept to your basic caveman was, of course, God. So enormous that you couldn’t see Him, touch Him, or hear Him (the prophets notwithstanding), He nonetheless had a very real impact in terms of earthquakes, lightning, and other forms of mass entertainment of the day. Next down were the cave bears and saber-toothed tigers. Enormous, yes; terrifying, definitely. But you could see them, and anything you could see you could run away from.

Humankind really started feeling comfortable with the natural world only after it had been domesticated and could actually do useful things for people. The cow gave us milk, for which we were grateful, but it was the dog that we wound up slinging Frisbees at. Why did Benji: The Hunted star a small cuddly stray mutt instead of an asphalt-clomping stray Holstein? Scale, ladies and gentlemen . . . scale!

The same variety of evolutionary downsizing applies to computers. They started out as enormous mainframes, behemoths hidden in the basement, unseen save for the acts of terror they inflicted upon humankind. And We Were Afraid and thought of them as angry, Old Testament-type gods. Before long, though, they got small enough to have around the house and they became useful: The Mac and the PC are now the draft horse and the cow — the big, smelly, daft-as-a-Manitoban-rice-steamer cow — of the modern homestead.

And finally, after several false starts with palmtop computers, I think the goofy Black Labrador Retriever of the computing world has arrived, in the form of the Newton MessagePad 2000. Oh, the previous Newtons were great, but compared to this latest edition, they’re pit bulls. Those of us who use and love our Newton 100s swear up and down that they’ve just gotten a bad rap in the press, but hey, just try convincing someone else to allow one around their children.

No, here at last is a digital companion, as it were, eager to please and always by one’s side. The MP 2000 is powerful not because it’s the most computationally incredible hardware on the planet but because it’s a friendly beast that’s perfectly scaled for humanity. Will this sweep us into a new chapter in our relationship with computers? Well, why not?

As it is, I think the Newton is my favorite Internet device. I waste so much time on the Internet, and not just by visiting the Spam Cam page. I read. Every morning, I spend my first two waking hours reading the morning news on CNN and MacInTouch and a bunch of other Web sites. It’s usually valuable information, but nonetheless, the Internet wastes my time because it demands that I be planted in front of a screen while I retrieve information.

Using NetHopper (the browser that ships with the MP 2000), I simply fill this electronic paperback with the digerata of the morning, and I’m free. NetHopper has an insanely simple and profound feature: It caches entire Web pages. So on Friday morning, I hit Roger Ebert’s page at the Sun-Times and–bang–reviews of all the new movies are in the cache, where I can read them whenever and wherever I have time.

But what will happen once we scale these things down even more? Well, we have a couple of preliminary answers in the form of Wearable Computers. The components already exist commercially: an eyepiece that tosses an enormous virtual screen over your field of vision, a keyboard and a pointer packaged in a fob that you twiddle with your fingers, and a bunch of Web sites that tell you how to manage to get them working with your portable computer.

And here we have the Ear Mites of the Industry. Oh, I’m excited about the concept, to be sure, but wow, what enormous pests these things could become. You thought it was annoying to have your lunch with your date interrupted by the burble of her cell phone . . . how will you feel when you finish your surefire story about the time the hotel receptionist mistook you for R.E.M.’s lead singer and suddenly realize that she’s been looking at you the whole time from behind a screenful of information from The X-Files Episode Guide? Is there the danger that in the future, we will see and hear only those things our computers have processed and filtered for us?

Well, actually, I was going to use that as a lead to a profound statement about the concept of The Enormous Scary Computer becoming The Tiny Scary Computer, but now that I think about it, that sounds kind of cool.

So you’re making the transition from managing a handful of Web pages to managing a site of dozens, even hundreds, of pages. But you’re wary of the challenges. You know that several tools are available to help you manage your site, from Adobe SiteMill to DeltaPoint’s QuickSite, but you’re also aware that these commercial applications are expensive and may not individually include all the features you need.

Before you decide to invest in a site-management program, consider an alternative that’s increasingly popular in the Mac Webmaster community: UserLand Software’s Frontier. Although it isn’t the easiest Mac application to use, it has very important advantages over most site-management tools on the market — it’s flexible, and it’s free.

The New Frontier

Frontier began life in the early 1990s as a commercial scripting environment, designed to automate file management and to remotely control scriptable applications. Today it’s free, and unlike AppleScript, Apple’s scripting software, it’s fully PowerPC-native and multithreaded and has a built-in database in which you can store information permanently.

With the advent of the World Wide Web, Frontier has become a powerful tool for Web-site management, allowing Webmasters to organize and automate the creation of large Web sites. You can also use it to create CGI (Common Gateway Interface) applications that add capabilities to Mac Web servers.

Frontier isn’t a WYSIWYG page-design application; you must know the basics of HTML to use it. In fact, it’s not much of an HTML editor, instead providing a framework for your Web site and its pages. Like AppleScript, Frontier is a scripting environment, and you’ll want to learn at least the rudiments of UserTalk, Frontier’s scripting language. This isn’t as challenging as it sounds, as you can easily get by with knowing only a few of Frontier’s many commands. But the fancier you want your site to be, the more you’ll want to spice it up with custom scripts.

In this article, we’ll give you a taste of Frontier’s structure and site-management interface; take you step by step through the site-creation process; and describe some of Frontier’s more important tools, including templates and glossaries.

Frontier Basics

So what is Frontier, anyway? It has two basic components — the Frontier application itself and a companion file, called Frontier.Root. The root file is actually a database, organized much like the Finder, with a tree structure. Like folders or an outline, the database is a hierarchical collection of objects. We’ll describe a few of the many kinds of objects, as we use Frontier to create a basic Web site.

The first kind of object you’re likely to notice is called a table. Tables can contain other objects, references to files, and even other tables (see Figure 1). Another useful object is wp text. Clicking on a wp text object reveals a window into which you can enter text, just as if you were typing in a word processor. For starters, you’ll enter most of your HTML pages’ body text into these text objects (accessible from the root table), although more-sophisticated pages can use other Frontier objects, such as outlines and scripts.

If you’ve ever worked with Microsoft Word in Outline mode, Frontier’s outline objects should look familiar to you. You can nest lines of text hierarchically and can rearrange outlines by dragging various outline elements. Outlines can play a special role in a Frontier-managed Web site: You can use them to create various kinds of lists, tables, and even forms. Scripts look quite a bit like outlines, except that instead of containing text, they contain commands in UserTalk (you can also write AppleScript scripts and store them in Frontier script objects, if you prefer).

Your First Frontier Web Site

A complete description of Frontier’s site-management capabilities and tools is beyond the scope of this article, but you can get a pretty good idea of them by creating a simple Web site. After you’ve launched Frontier and entered your name and e-mail address as prompted, you can create a new site or import an existing site into your root file. Frontier can properly parse pages created by HTML editors such as Adobe PageMill and Claris Home Page.

To see the full benefit of Frontier’s automation capabilities, let’s create a site from scratch, using these steps:

1. Select New Site from the Web menu. Name your site “user.websites.mySite,” and click on OK. Frontier creates a table containing directives (the table entries beginning with #) as well as empty glossary and tools entries. Directives contain information that will be automatically incorporated into the HTML pages Frontier generates for mySite when you give it the command to create, or, in Frontier parlance, render the site. Directives in the table affect every page in the site and in subsidiary tables, unless you override them with other directives specific to a given page (see Figure 2). Most of the directives Frontier supplies for you pertain to the colors that will be applied to pages controlled by the table.

2. Before you can create Web pages, you have to tell Frontier where to put the HTML files it renders. You do this by choosing a destination with your site’s #ftpSite table. Click on the triangle at the left of #ftpSite to open the table, and you’ll see that Frontier has stored the path of a local folder it has created for your pages in the Folder entry and has made a space for you to enter your site’s URL. After you’ve rendered your site, Frontier can use FTP client software to upload your pages to a Web server. For now, store your site in the local folder. Close the #ftpSite table.

3. With your mySite table frontmost in Frontier, select New Text from the Table menu. Name the text cell “home” (it’ll become your site’s default home page), and click on OK. Open the new entry, and type

#title “My First Page”

This is my first page.

This is just a test.

You have just created your first Web page in Frontier. If you’d rather use a text editor to create and modify your pages, you can use BBEdit. With BBEdit installed, highlight the home entry you just made and launch your home page in BBEdit with the keystroke Command-E. When you save your changes in BBEdit and return to Frontier, the text will appear within your text cell.

To preview your page, highlight the home entry in your Web site’s table and select View in Browser from Frontier’s Web menu. The page that appears in your browser isn’t fancy, but it’s all yours!

4. Add this line to the beginning of your home text cell:

#template “normal”

Now preview the page in your browser. It looks something like Figure 3. You’ve just gotten your first taste of the power of Frontier’s templates and produced a basic home page. Now let’s take a look at some more-advanced features that Frontier offers.

Massaging the Page

You may have noticed that your rendered pages, especially the one to which you applied the “normal” template, contain information and text you haven’t actually typed yourself. Frontier’s rendering process does some very neat, and welcome, transformations of your text.

First, anytime you type a URL, Frontier will automatically insert the appropriate tags around it, so that http: //www.macintouch.com would be rendered as <a href= “http://www.macintouch.com”> http://www.macintouch.com </a>. In a similar vein, if you type an e-mail address into your text, Frontier will add the appropriate tags to make it a clickable mailto: link. And if you’ve typed accent characters, Frontier converts them into the appropriate ISO-8859-1 text, so most Web browsers will display them correctly.

Frontier’s coolest text-substitution features, though, are glosseries. A glossary is a table containing the names of Web locations and their URLs. When you type the name of a site, surrounded by quotes, in your text objects, Frontier renders the name as a properly formatted link to that site. So “MacUser” would be rendered as <a href = “http://www.zdnet.com/macuser/”>MacUser</a>. Imagine the amount of time you could save by simply typing in “Products” or “Contact Information” and letting Frontier fill in the links to pages in your site for you. Frontier even adds a Scripts menu to Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, allowing you to add any Web site you happen to be browsing to your main Glossary file, with a single command.

Even More Automation

In theory, you don’t actually need to know any UserTalk in order to set up simple Web sites in Frontier. However, scripts (which are referred to as macros when embedded in your Web pages) add so much power to your pages that you’ll find yourself diving into the language in no time at all. For example, a call to Frontier’s current-time command, within braces — {clock.now()} — inserts the current date and time into your Web pages when you render your site, so you can time-stamp each page.

Another handy macro, by the name of {outlineSite()}, adds an outline object representing your entire site, wherever you use the macro in a rendered page.

You can also create automatic Next/Previous links at the top or bottom of your pages with a macro. Run it on your Web table in Frontier before you render your site. The command generates an outline window listing all of your site’s pages. Drag the pages into the order you want, and add this macro to your templates: <P> {linkPrev (“Previous”)} | {linkNext (“Next”)} </p><hr>. Frontier’s rendering process will take care of the rest.

The kind of information you can put into your pages with macros is limited only by your ingenuity and knowledge of UserTalk, but remember that these are not CGI scripts; whatever shows up on your Web pages is the result of your scripts at the time your site was rendered and is not updated in real time when your pages are viewed.

Two years ago when a small-business owner in New York launched an attractive members-only resort, she violated two business rules: setting the price of goods before nailing down her costs and inadvertently mixing up her personal and business records. As a result, she bit into her business profits.

It wasn’t until after she reorganized her books for “business use only” that the resort owner discovered her costs for hamburgers, paper goods, and other expenses far exceeded her estimated prices. Even worse was that she’d already commissioned an artist to create her snack bar signs listing prices. With summer fast approaching, the entrepreneur quickly compensated for the error by introducing higher priced daily specials, tightly controlling the size of food portions, and shopping around for cheaper supplies.

Whether you sell french fries or financial advice, it’s important to set aside time from your busy schedule to study your company’s vital statistics. With the same care a doctor gives the human heart, you need to measure the pulse of your company’s finances and create meaningful records, including a chart of accounts, a cash flow statement, and a monthly profit-and-loss statement. With these tools, you can compare your numbers with those of others in your industry and–should you spot an anomaly–take action to improve your operating efficiency. What’s more, since the IRS will likely want to make its own diagnosis, having organized business books will make it a snap for you to file tax returns.

To help your company’s heart beat at a healthy clip, in this first installment of our three-part series we explain the essentials of financial recordkeeping, prescribe a report-generating routine, and dissect a profit-and-loss statement. Over time, following a healthy financial regimen will increase the longevity of your venture.

Taking Your EKG: Create a Chart of Accounts

Naturally, most of us are in business to make a profit. And the way to know if your enterprise is in the black is to track every transaction in a chart of accounts. Whatever type of business you’re in, the circulatory system is the same: money comes in; money goes out; inventory and supplies are received; and merchandise and services are supplied.

To record these events, you will need to create files to store such documents as sales slips, packing slips, check deposits, and so forth. Then, at least once a week, enter your financial transactions either in a paperbound ledger or in an accounting program’s master chart of accounts, which are divided into the following five categories.

1. Assets, everything your business owns that has cash value, such as real estate, accounts receivable, inventory, and cash.

2. Liabilities, what your company owes, including accounts payable and loans.

3. Capital, your investment in the business.

4. Revenues, your income from sales and investments.

5. Expenses, your costs of doing business, including insurance premiums and taxes. Now here’s where it gets tricky–and where a computer package comes in handy: Every business transaction you enter is either a debit or credit, which increases or decreases the value of corresponding accounts. Fortunately, programs such as QuickBooks  (Intuit) or Accounting Software Group’s Small Business Accounting Software automatically recrunch your numbers each time you enter a new transaction. In addition, many programs prompt you to set up a chart of accounts based on your type of business.

Of course, you might ask your accountant to assist in setting up your chart of accounts to avoid mistakes. And you may even need your financial adviser’s help to figure out more complicated calculations, such as the depreciation of equipment. But stop there: You don’t want to rely on others to completely interpret your financial data–it’s up to you to understand what’s happening in your own company.

Checking Your Pulse: Prepare a Profit-and-Loss Statement

Also known as an income statement, this report would have helped our resort owner zero in on the hidden costs of a chef’s salad. Unfortunately, some business owners are nearsighted when it comes to finances and only know if they’re generating cash. But it’s the profit-and-loss statement (P&L) that reveals whether you’re actually turning a profit. “A P&L smoothes out the ups and downs of cash and gives you a better picture of your company’s overall health,” says David H. Bangs Jr., author of Managing by the Numbers (Upstart Publishing).

Take our New York resort. By capturing the owner’s gross (how much money her business was projected to generate in a given month) minus the variable cost or cost of goods sold (including hamburgers and paper goods), she could have calculated her company’s gross profit margin. From there, she needed to subtract all her other expenses (such as insurance and employee salaries) to get to her pretax profit.

Indeed, by taking the pulse of your business with a P&L, you can quickly diagnose operational maladies. For the best results, run a P&L each month as well as at the end of your fiscal year; then create a projected P&L for the forthcoming year. By doing so, you’ll plot your financial progress over time and be able to ask such questions as, “Is my business more or less profitable than last year? Are expenses growing at the same rate as revenues–or faster? Are my sales significantly below my expectations?” (For more information, see the annotated chart, “What Can You Tell From Your P&L? “)

Monitoring Your Blood Flow: Compile a Cash Flow Statement

When you look over your business’s finances, they can appear completely healthy on paper. But beware: Your company may be slowly suffocating due to poor cash flow. “The P&L checks that you’re making money, but cash flow is what sustains your business,” notes Harriet Greenberg, a partner at the accounting firm Friedman Alpren & Green LLP in New York. Seasonal businesses in particular are prone to cash squeezes, running out of money to pay bills during slow months. Compiling both a monthly cash flow statement and a six- or 12-month projection helps you know exactly where you stand (or should be standing), so you can plan ahead.

Like a P&L, you can use popular accounting programs to set up a cash flow spreadsheet that includes:

Receipts, cash sales and credit payments for current and future months from customers as well as interest income.

Disbursements, taxes, insurance premiums, capital expenditures, licensing fees as well as salaries.

To calculate your cash flow, subtract your disbursements from your receipts, and you’ll see your cash position. If the number comes up negative, you’ll know you need to borrow money, stretch out payments of bills, or put off major purchases. Conversely, if you discover you have a big surplus, you can put that cash to work for you by making major equipment investments, taking advantage of volume discounts on supplies, or depositing the money in a interest-beating account.

Preparing a cash flow projection is a bit trickier than a statement, because you don’t know when credit customers will actually pay. In this case, look at your financial history to estimate how long it takes to get your money. Better yet, find your “average days collection” figure by dividing your total sales by 365 (for every day of the year) and then dividing that number into your accounts receivable.

With this number you can project the days that it’ll take you to collect. This also is a handy exercise to see if your accounts receivable are overdue. Ideally, you should receive money in hand within 30 days of your business transaction. If your average days to collect are 60 or more, you’re most likely financing someone else’s business.

As you can see, a cash flow statement or projection can give you a instant X-ray of your position. But if you still feel your finances are anemic, run a “rolling” six- or 12-month cash projection. After you fill in the actual numbers for the month you just closed, continue on for the next 11 months.

Says Lorre McKeone, a North Platte, Nebraska, entrepreneur who teaches business owners money management: “[Long-term] cash flow projections help you understand sales trends–so you can adjust your marketing efforts.” Of course, projections work fine if everything goes as planned. But in business if something can go wrong, it will. That’s even more reason to take these preventive financial measures.

Can you have multiple Web servers, application servers, and database servers without transaction-oriented middleware? We doubt it.

Oh, what a tangled Web we weave when first we practice to write three-tier Web-based applications without using transaction processing (TP) monitor middleware. The same software technology mainframes use to process millions of transactions per day, recast into Web-suitable form, is a sine qua non for developing and running business-automation applications on an intranet or the Internet.

The effort to program the business logic isn’t the issue here. Supporting thousands of clients is. Business logic analysts and programmers have neither the time nor the expertise to create the transaction-oriented, network-based architecture a high-volume application will demand in everyday use; they have enough work to do automating business procedures and rules.

Fortunately, a small but growing group of vendors offers Web-aware TP monitor tools you can choose from. Some of these are mature, pre-Web products to which vendors have added Web awareness, while others are new tools designed expressly for use within applications based on Web browsers and HTTP servers. Read on to explore the software technologies embodied by Web-based TP monitors.

Transactional Superglue

People sometimes call middleware “glue” or “plumbing,” and a few even mystically say, “If you need to ask what middleware is, you don’t need it.” Web-based TP monitor middleware is simpler to understand than vague metaphors and churlish misdirections imply.

The levels of a three-tier architecture are presentation, business logic, and data storage. Middleware exists between each of the tiers, connecting the presentation layer to the business logic layer and the business logic layer to the data storage layer. For example, you might use a Cisco router or a transaction-aware Java class library to distribute incoming HTTP traffic among several Web servers–the router or the Java class performs a middleware role. Software you incorporate into the application to help distribute transactions among multiple application servers (running the business logic) is middleware. Whether purchased or home-grown, application components that distribute database server requests across several relational database management system (RDBMS) servers are also middleware. The connectivity software (or, in some cases, hardware) is the middleware, and its place in the system assures transaction integrity and enforces security, in addition to balancing the work load. Web middleware, and TP monitors in particular, gives designers and programmers the intra-application network linkages and services that let a distributed Web-based application handle a large number of clients.

TP Middleware

Middleware categories include TP monitors, Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) and remote procedure call (RPC) environments, messaging, object request brokers (ORBs), and database access tools. TP monitor products offer a middleware environment oriented toward handling transactions over a network. For example, TP monitors bracket developer-defined application operations with implied BEGIN TRANSACTION and END TRANSACTION. By using TP monitor services, applications don’t have to specifically provide for transaction integrity.

TP monitors help the various parts of an application running on several computers coordinate with each other, performing tasks such as queuing transactions, balancing transaction work load, managing and isolating transaction processes and threads, monitoring the completion of transactions, and verifying rights and permissions. Further, a Web-based TP monitor overcomes HTTP’s inherent statelessness by recognizing which HTTP messages (Web pages, most likely) belong to each transaction, or by augmenting HTTP with the monitor’s own state-maintaining protocol.

You integrate TP monitor services into an application in several ways. You can insert statements into your application program that call the TP monitor’s APIs, or register with the TP monitor those application components and resources that relate to a transaction, or sometimes by taking both actions. Some TP monitor APIs are extremely simple, while others are more involved. In either case, invoking the APIs is usually quite easy once you identify where in your application’s flow the transactions occur. TP monitor vendors currently have proprietary APIs, but most say they plan to implement the new X/Open standard APIs.

Here’s another example of how a Web-based TP monitor can help an application run smoothly in the face of a high volume of transaction requests. Because you configure the middleware with information about which database servers are equivalent copies of each other, as well as which databases a transaction can affect, the middleware can monitor server activity and send SQL messages to less busy database servers. If a particular server fails, the middleware queues the SQL request and delivers it when the server returns to the network. Alternatively, the middleware can reroute the message to a different database server that (as you’ve designed) is a replicated copy of the failed server. Without faltering, the system continues to process transactions that don’t need access to the failed server. Some middleware products can even route HTTP messages to Web servers that are less busy.

Web-Based Solutions

Companies such as BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Prolifics, Visigenics, and KIVA are in the forefront of Web TP monitor technology. Each takes a somewhat different approach to helping your application process transactions.

BEA offers Java programmers transaction services with its Jolt product, a collection of class libraries and functions that complement BEA’s well-known Tuxedo middleware. Jolt also replaces HTTP with its own Jolt Transaction Protocol (JTP), which gives Jolt-based Java programs extra capabilities beyond the limited, document-presentation-oriented HTTP. JTP helps Jolt maintain transaction state information and helps servers distribute transaction workloads.

Tuxedo, which supplies the basic middleware services to a Jolt/Java application, is a distributed transaction monitor. It gives developers message-oriented functions implemented in terms of transaction semantics. Tuxedo consists of a transaction manager, queue services, a domain feature, DCE integration functions, and client components. The transaction manager provides naming services, dynamic message routing, load balancing, configuration management, transaction management, and security. Queue services provide a messaging framework that insulates business logic from the specifics of the underlying transport layers of the network. The domain feature allows you to segment application components on a large network into administratively autonomous groups. Tuxedo’s DCE integration is a set of utilities and libraries that can provide DCE services and functions to Tuxedo-based applications.

Programmers use Application-to-Transaction Manager Interface (ATMI), a set of 30 API function calls, to incorporate Tuxedo into their applications. The Open Group has adopted ATMI as a standard X/Open API. The ATMI toolset gives developers asynchronous service calls (callback functions), typed buffers, service request forwarding, service request prioritization, and dynamic, programmatically controlled data routing.

Prolifics, a company that offers a product of the same name, gives Tuxedo-based application designers a visual tool for incorporating database-oriented business logic. The tool emits HTML, JavaScript, and (soon) Java to help Tuxedo IS shops develop three-tier Web applications.

Borland’s Midas (a not-quite acronym for Multitier Distributed Application Services), in development as we went to press, is an object monitor for Web applications. It consists of three broker components: Business ObjectBroker, Remote DataBroker, and ConstraintBroker. The Business ObjectBroker performs load balancing and assures transaction integrity for OLE Automation objects (i.e., ActiveX components) registered with it. The Remote DataBroker acts as an intermediary between thin clients (e.g., browsers), business logic, and database servers. ConstraintBroker copies database constraint logic onto the computer running the business logic and lets the business logic use those constraints as data edits. Without ConstraintBroker, applications must either contain data edits that express the same database integrity rules as the constraints in the database or face the likelihood of insert/update failures when issuing SQL statements to the RDBMS. Constraint Broker reduces network traffic and simplifies application maintenance.

Likely the neatest feature of Borland’s Midas technology is that you don’t have to insert code into your applications to take advantage of it. Borland says it will supply graphical tools for registering applications with Midas and configuring their behaviors.

IBM’s numerous middleware products currently connect more computers and applications, in more diverse ways, than any other. For Web-based applications, IBM supplies developers with IBM Transaction Server, which runs on OS/2 Warp, AIX, and Windows NT and was formerly called CICS for OS/2, CICS for AIX, and CICS for NT. It acts as an enterprise-wide coordinator and integrator of servers and clients, managing applications and data sources across a network. IBM also offers Encina, MQSeries, and the CICS Gateway for Java.

IBM Transaction Server is a TP monitor middleware product that ensures integrity for transactions involving a set of related updates (all the updates succeed or all the updates fail and get rolled back), allocates system resources to transaction-oriented applications, launches applications as necessary to process transactions, balances workloads across application servers, and even initiates transactions within Lotus Notes. IBM bundles CICS Gateway for Lotus Notes and IBM CICS Internet Gateway with its Transaction Server products. The CICS Internet Gateway interfaces Web servers and CICS applications, translating between HTML and 3270 data streams in order to, for example, let Web browsers display 3270 screens as if they were Web pages.

IBM’s complementary products for Transaction Server include Encina and MQSeries. Encina is a DCE-integrated (and RPC-based) transaction processing solution. MQSeries is a platform-neutral messaging facility; it uses a message queue coupled with a transaction monitor to free interbusiness developers from having to comply with one another’s network infrastructure and timing requirements. The CICS Gateway for Java consists of small Java class libraries developers can use to connect their applets to CICS programs running elsewhere on the network.

Microsoft Transaction Server manages low-level operating system resources, such as processes and threads, thus allowing concurrent client access to applications. It synchronizes access to shared data, lessening the effect of multiuser database access as it routes transactions to application servers and database servers. Transaction Server supports ActiveX, has a simple programming interface for hooking into your application, and offers just-in-time instantiation of object components. This middleware product manages a pool of ODBC connections that clients can draw from, and it can act as a repository for shared data variables that multiple concurrently executing processes can access. The application components that Transaction Server manages are location-transparent, meaning they can reside virtually anywhere on the network without the application having to keep track of which server, drive letter, or directory structure contains them.

An application environment that includes Transaction Server has an architecture consisting of base processes (client programs, which might be browsers), application components (implementation of business logic, written as ActiveX components), the Transaction Server Executive (manages transactions and provides services to application components), resource dispensers (distribute and control shared resources, such as database connections), and resource managers (SQL Server is an example).

Microsoft Transaction Server, like most other TP monitors, has a proprietary API. While other vendors plan to implement the new X/Open standard APIs, Microsoft plans to stick with its ActiveX component model and simple calling conventions. Transaction Server adds just two new APIs: GetObjectContext() and SafeRef().