Transact Manager 18.11: What's New & Key Features

What's New

The key driver for TM 18.11 is to add support for the Transact Workspaces spaces development and to support this a new Workspaces API has been built. This is Swagger restful API which supports queries & updates and also includes paging facilities.

The TM 18.11 release also includes significant form initialization performance improvements for large forms (see Maestro Static Content Externalization below).

This release also includes support for Open JDK 11 and Wildfly 14 which puts TM on a long term support branch for Java and also benefits from a number of updates to dependent libraries and also a number of core java security enhancements. The Open JDK 11 has useful performance improvements for high throughput workloads with improved memory management and new parallel GC1 garbage collector. This JDK also supports searchable Javadoc in the Transact SDK distribution.

Key Features

Maestro Form - Static Content Externalization (SCE)

Transact Manager now includes a new Maestro Form rendering mode which significantly reduces the time it takes to load large forms. This is important as long application loading times can significantly increase the bounce rate with users simply closing the browser window before starting the application. Using the new Maestro SCE Mode rendering option, TM will externalized 85-95% of the Maestro HTML form content which can then be served in parallel by Content Distribution Networks (CDNs). This substantially reduces the amount of time it takes a form to initialize as the initial HTML page is downloaded very quickly and the larger static JSON and JS content can be downloaded in parallel by separate browser threads. By serving this static content out of CDN's they are much more likely to be close to the users device reducing the network latency and this content can also be cached by the users browser. For large Maestro applications we have see a 2x reduction in form load times. For the TM sever there area also benefits, and under performance load tests we have observed a 20% throughput improvement with this option enabled. The Maestro Static Content Externalization (SCE) mode works with older Maestro Release forms and does not require any changes to the Maestro forms to use it. Maestro SCE Mode is a opt in feature and can be enabled on a system by setting the 'Maestro SCE Mode' check box on the 'Composer Render HTML Form' service.

Security Enhancements & Library Upgrades

• Add Validation of date field to the workspace portal to fix internal error when provided date is invalid, TMR-1422
• Enhance security around service connection password in the manager UI, TMR-138
• Remove confirmation page and receipting from the Server Monitor Form configuration, TMR-1613

Upgrades to various third party libraries undertaken in 18.11 to make sure TM has the latest updates, Including:

• TM now uses Open JDK 11
• User Agent Utils upgraded to 1.21
• Spring Framework upgraded to 4.3.19
• Spring Security upgraded to 43.1.7
• Bouncycastle upgraded to 1.60
• Remove JLine library from TM and upgrade SDK version to 3.9
• Upgrade org.apache.xmlgraphics batik to 1.10

Fluent API Additions

Each TM release includes additions to the Fluent API set while coverage of this API grows, 18.11 is no different and includes updated to the Fluent API.

These API additions should introduce no compatibility issues with the services developed for the previous version.

A full table giving a summary of the updated Fluent API can be found in the Fluent API section of the Fluent API.

Additonal Enhancements

• Workspace API which helps provide a rich UI experience for users,
• Improvements to the System Event Publisher (SEP) feed,
• Platform support enhancements.

For full details on TM 18.11 see: TJM 18.11