Datasheet for Developers

Distributed Software Developers

Focus your talent on application content, instead of sockets, packets and shared memory.
Share data without network programming.
Develop location-independent, plug-and-play, distributed services.
Introduce new components to systems without modifying existing code.
Add, remove or replace component processes with no system down-time.
Interoperate seamlessly across networks of heterogeneous computers.

The Rendezvous software bus is a revolutionary API toolkit. Its powerful, innovative, easy-to- use tools help you build scalable distributed applications. The Rendezvous software bus reduces complexity in distributed systems by hiding the network programming details, so Rendezvous applications are easier to develop, manage and use.

Rendezvous applications communicate using a generic producer/consumer model, so you can build large distributed systems from software components that remain independent-separately maintained and individually replaceable. Diverse applications can share data across LANs and WANs. Programs on heterogenous platforms can communicate transparently. You can add new application components to the network dynamically. Systems scale smoothly across several orders of magnitude.

A Better Way to Build Distributed Systems

The Rendezvous software bus goes beyond traditional communications packages that provide remote processing, network transparency and cross-architecture data conversions. The Rendezvous software bus adds innovative technology, such as subject based addressing,┐self-describing data, and anonymous, decoupled communication. These features promote system-wide location transparency, platform independence and dynamic component replaceability.

Reducing dependencies bewteen application components leads to more robust systems. Rendezvous applications depend on only a few basic common elements-subject names that denote the information items, and the names of data elements within each data object.

Accelerate software development cycles by eliminating the complexity traditionally associated with network programming. Since the Rendezvous software bus hides networking details, developers can devote more resources to application-specific concerns.

You can develop many kinds of applications more rapidly and efficiently than ever before by using the Rendezvous software bus. Typical application domains include workflow and factory automation, bulletin boards, enterprise scheduling, distributed system management tools, distributed file systems, multi-player games, load-balancing and fault-tolerant services, and real-time adaptations of existing programs and tools.

More Ways to Communicate

Three distinct kinds of interactions occur between applications in distributed computing, and the Rendezvous software bus supports all three.

Publish/subscribe interactions support reliable, simultaneous data dissemination to multiple consuming applications, as in materials movement or retail sales and inventory systems.
Request/reply interactions support applications such as transaction processing, database query and remote device control.
Broadcast request/reply interactions support distributed services, such as databases with multiple query servers.

Everything You Need in a Single Box

Communications API. Send and receive data. Point-to-point, broadcast and request/reply.

Message API. Self-describing data messages are independent of hardware architecture and operating system conventions on the sending and receiving computers.

Advisory API. Standardize warning and error messages throughout your distributed system.

Event Manager API. Dispatch asynchronous events, including network and device I/O, window system events, timer interrupts and signals.

Rendezvous Daemon. Reliable message delivery. Filter subject-addressed messages. Dispatch messages to application processes.

Rendezvous routing daemon (licensed separately). Forward messages efficiently across network boundaries, without any changes to existing Rendezvous application code.

Perl interface. Mirrors the C language API, for rapid prototyping or system administration.

Benefits

Location transparency
Platform independence (hardware, operating system, network configurations and protocols)
Dynamic component replacement
Faster application development
Hides networking details
Shifts design emphasis toward application domain issues
Applications scale easily

Communications & Data Features

Anonymous communication
High fan-out, reliable broadcast
Point-to-point request/reply
Subject-based addressing, fine-grained filtering, wildcard subscriptions
Self-describing data messages
Transparent packetization and reassembly

Development Features

Compact ANSI-C library; Perl interface
Source code compatibility between all supported platforms
Interoperates with any event handler, for example, X or Microsoft Windows
Distributed licensing-no license server

More Features

Transparent communication among peers on all platforms
Transparent coexistence with other communications mechanisms on the same computers and networks
Supports any data interchange format
Low overhead: library size <100kB; programs as small as 64kB; communications daemon executable size 100kB (initial load)
Thread-safe, multi-processor safe

Platform Support

The Rendezvous software bus operates on many hardware and operating system platforms including:

 
Hardware                 O/S 
DEC Alpha                Digital UNIX (formerly OSF/1) 
DEC Alpha                OpenVMS 

DECstation               Ultrix 
DEC VAX                  OpenVMS 
Hitachi                  HI-UX

HP 9000/700, 800         HP/UX 
HP 9000/700, 800         NEXTSTEP 

IBM RS/6000              AIX 

Intel 386 (or greater)   NEXTSTEP 
Intel 386 (or greater)   Novell UnixWare 
Intel 386 (or greater)   MS Windows NT 
Intel 386 (or greater)   MS Windows (NetManage only) 

Motorola 88000           SVR4 
NeXT ("Black")           NEXTSTEP

PowerPC                  Windows NT 
PowerPC                  AIX 

Silicon Graphics         Irix 
Stratus I860             FTX 

Sun SPARC                SunOS 
Sun SPARC                Solaris 
Sun SPARC                NEXTSTEP

Want to Learn More?

Send an e-mail request to rv-info@tss.com

Browse our Web pages at http://www.tss.com
Phone us toll-free at 800-675-8250.

Return to Rendezvous Home Page

Copyright ⌐ 1995 Teknekron Software Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Rendezvous is a trademark and TIB is a registered trademark of Teknekron Software Systems, Inc.
All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.