Summary: 12/25/2009

Written in the early to mid-90s, txObject ATK was a useful toolkit for the days when Java did not exist or was not performant, as well as, not suitable for embedded development. Now over 15+ years later, I decided to fix all compiler issues for the platforms I have access to. txObject ATK has been awaken, not reborn. In other words, txObject ATK does not use the latest C++ technologies and/or design patterns.

Quick Tutorial

txObject ATK's five-layer framework contains the following: Object Library, I/O & Timers, Threads, Inter-Process Communication, and Distributed Object Communication. All libraries are currently supported on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and most variants of the Unix operating systems. Progress Software's ObjectStore Database support is also featured for those platforms the ObjectStore application runs on.

A correlation can be made between txObject ATK and Sun Microsystems Inc. Java Language. txObject ATK has many of the advantages Java has, but without some of the performance issues commonly associated with the Java Language. Java's initial advantages are its platform independent built-in and publicly available support libraries. Due to the basic nature of Java, its libraries have a common object-oriented feel and data flow model. txObject ATK has accomplished a similar Java-like environment for C++.

Another correlation can be made between txObject ATK and the CORBA Standards. As demand increases for applications to run in distributed environments and on multiple platforms, projects have had a new added complexity to their traditional development cycle. txObject ATK greatly decreases such complexity in a similar way CORBA does but with two fundamental differences. The first distinction is that txObject ATK is a tightly coupled peer-to-peer distributed system, where CORBA is a loosely coupled client-server model. The second division is that txObject ATK distributed objects are state and transaction consistent. CORBA provides distributed object interfaces without state.

txObject ATK is ideal for developing embedded applications. It has been optimized for memory and CPU constrained systems. The entire software package is comprised of 5,000 lines of class declaration code and 10,000 lines of implementation code. Further reading shall account for the size of each layer.

Each layer of the txObject ATK is a foundation for every successive layer. In order for a particular layer to operate, it requires the layers below it but not the ones above. Since layer 1 is the base for all other layers, close attention should be paid. Each component in layer 1 will be used intimately throughout layers 2-5.

Thats it. Start showing off your new found productivity ;-)