Open System Services Porting Guide (G06.24+, H06.03+)

Introduction to Porting
Open System Services Porting Guide—520573-006
1-7
Overview of the OSS Environment
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Overview of the OSS Environment
Open System Services is an interface through which users and programs interact with
the HP NonStop operating system. The OSS environment provides an open interface
to the operating system for supporting portable applications—applications that can run
on a wide range of platforms from multiple manufacturers. A portable application can
move between the NonStop system and another platform with ease.
To achieve portability, applications are written to comply with a group of industry
standards. An application issues calls to a standardized application program interface
(API) a set of functions common to multiple platforms.
In addition, Open System Services allows users to request system functions
interactively through a command interpreter (called the “shell”) and through a variety of
utility programs. The shell and utilities feature a standard set of operations, command
syntax, and presentation style common to multiple UNIX systems. The shell
commands offer alternatives to many of the products that run in the Guardian
environment.
Beyond the common operations defined by the standards, Open System Services
allows customers to access such fundamental NonStop system features as parallel
processing, data integrity and reliability, and linear expandability to meet growing
processing needs. These features combine to distinguish Open System Services from
other systems following the same open standards; they add significant extended value
to the environment.
Open System Services also supports a variety of middleware software, such as HP
NonStop Tuxedo, HP NonStop Distributed Object Manager/MP, and the NonStop
Server for Java product, that might also be used in an application you are porting. For
more information on porting with such middleware, refer to the manual set for the
specific software product in which you are interested.
In summary, Open System Services provides standards-based, open system interfaces
for operating system services, development tools, and utilities on NonStop systems.
Open System Services accomplishes this goal by offering a quality software product
that contains fundamental NonStop system features and standard software to promote
both application portability and people portability among conforming systems.
Portability goes beyond the portability of code and data; it also includes the portability
of users when they move from one environment to another. When a user moves from
one environment to another, there is training that needs to be done to understand the
differences in the tools in the different environments.