Tuxedo (Transactions for Unix, Extended for Distributed Operations) is a middleware platform used to manage distributed transaction processing in distributed computing environments. Tuxedo is a transaction processing system or transaction-oriented middleware, or enterprise application server for a variety of systems and programming languages. Developed by AT&T in the 1980s, it became a software product of Oracle Corporation in 2008 when they acquired BEA Systems. Tuxedo is now part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware. History From the beginning in 1983, AT&T designed Tuxedo for high availability and to provide extremely scalable applications to support applications requiring thousands of transactions per second on commonly available distributed systems. The original development targeted the creation and administration of operations support systems for the US telephone company that required online transaction processing (OLTP) capabilities. The Tuxedo concepts derived from the Loop Maintenance Operations System (LMOS). Tuxedo supported moving the LMOS application off mainframe systems that used Information Management System (IMS) from IBM on to much cheaper distributed systems running (AT&T's own) Unix. The original Tuxedo team comprised members of the LMOS team, including Juan M. Andrade, Mark T. Carges, Terrence Dwyer, and Stephen Felts. In 1993 Novell acquired the Unix System Laboratories (USL) division of AT&T which was responsible for the development of Tuxedo at the time. In September 1993 it was called the "best known" distributed transaction processing monitor, running on 25 different platforms. In February 1996, BEA Systems made an exclusive agreement with Novell to develop and distribute Tuxedo on non-NetWare platforms, with most Novell employees working with Tuxedo joining BEA. In 2008, Oracle Corporation acquired BEA Systems, and TUXEDO was marketed as part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware product line. Tuxedo has been used as transactional middleware by a number of multi-tier application development tools. The Open Group used some of the Tuxedo interfaces as the basis of their standards such as X/Open XA and XATMI. The Tuxedo developers published papers about it in the early 1990s. Later it became the basis of some research projects. Features Standards based APIs - SCA, The Open Group XATMI, Object Management Group CORBA Communication types - Synchronous, Asynchronous, Conversational, Unsolicited Notifications, Publish/subscribe Typed buffers FML/FML32 - Self-describing fielded buffers similar to Abstract Syntax Notation One or Fast Infoset XML STRING and multibyte strings MBSTRING CARRAY binary blobs VIEW/VIEW32 externally described records RECORD representing COBOL record structures Transaction Management - Global Transactions - Two-phase commit protocol