2.2 Tamino Architecture and APIs
Figure 2.1 provides an overview of Tamino's architecture. The primary access to Tamino XML Server is via HTTP?that is, via one or more Web servers, which may be local or remote to the Tamino server. This makes the Internet and an intranet first-class clients of Tamino. Tamino provides the so-called X-Port component (i.e., an extension for the most popular Web servers, which guarantees efficient communication between a Web server and the Tamino XML Server using Software AG's TCP/IP-based transport software XTS?extended transport system?which supports SSL-protected communication). If the client application uses SSL communication with the Web server, the whole path from client application to Tamino database server is secure.
Figure 2.1. Tamino Architecture
Tamino XML Server directly supports the HTTP methods GET, PUT, DELETE, HEAD to read documents, store or replace documents, delete documents, and get information about documents stored in Tamino. More elaborate functionality is transported via the GET or the POST method (using multipart form data)?for example, queries or schema definitions. Clients can be browsers or applications using Tamino's APIs, which map a convenient programming interface to HTTP calls. Such APIs are available for Java, ActiveX, JavaScript, and .NET. The Java API offers the Java programmer comfortable access to data stored in Tamino by using different object models (DOM, SAX, JDOM) or stream-based access. Included with the Tamino API for Java is the Tamino EJB API that allows enterprise application developers to write business applications using Tamino XML Server as a resource manager in an Enterprise Java Beans environment.
Starting with Tamino version 4, an option accesses Tamino without having to pass through a Web server, which saves some overhead for applications in the intranet. Again, this access is based on XTS and therefore can also be SSL secured.
The Tamino administration tool, Tamino Manager, is embedded in Software AG's administration framework, System Management Hub. It provides a browser-based fully functional graphical administration interface to Tamino, as well as a command-line facility for administration. The concept of a single point of control is illustrated in Figure 2.2: From one instance of Tamino Manager, you can manage all Tamino servers in your local network.
Figure 2.2. Tamino Administration Provides a Single Point of Control
By default, documents are completely stored inside Tamino. It is possible, however, to integrate other data sources into the Tamino XML view.
Tamino X-Node provides access to external relational databases as well as to Software AG's Adabas. Data residing in these systems can be included in the XML documents delivered by Tamino XML Server. Also, information included in XML documents stored in Tamino can be propagated to the external systems.
The second option providing openness in Tamino XML Server is a feature called Tamino X-Tension: An element, attribute, or subtree of an XML document, rather than being stored, can be passed to a user-provided mapping function. This function takes over responsibility for the storage of data. It can access an external system or can decide to store information at some other place in Tamino's data store. For retrieval, the corresponding mapping function is used to retrieve the same part of the XML document.
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