OSI/FTAM Programming Guide
Introduction to NonStop OSI/FTAM
HP NonStop OSI/FTAM Programming Guide—528612-001
1-3
The FTAM Application Environment
defined in that standard and is consistent with the Government Open Systems
Interconnection Profile (GOSIP), which means that it can interoperate with a large
variety of other FTAM implementations. With NonStop FTAM, your applications can
exchange and manage files across an OSI network, with record-level access to
structured text files. You can copy, move, and delete the following kinds of files, as well
as determine and modify a range of attributes:
•
Unstructured text files (called FTAM-1 files)
•
Structured text files (called FTAM-2 files)
•
Binary files (called FTAM-3 files)
The FTAM Application Environment
Your application gains access to FTAM functions through a set of library procedures
called the FTAM API. Through the API, your application communicates with a process
called the NonStop FTAM initiator, which communicates with an entity called a
responder on a remote system. As shown in Figure 1-2 on page 1-4, the API is part of
your application process; the initiator is a separate process, which resides on the same
system as your application and not on another NonStop system.
The FTAM API consists of three types of procedures:
•
FTAM protocol procedures, which correspond to primitives defined in the FTAM
standard. You use these procedures to request services of remote FTAM
responders. These procedures begin with the prefix FTM.
•
General-support procedures. You use these procedures mainly to allocate and
deallocate buffer space for use by the FTAM API, or to retrieve event and error
information. These procedures begin with the prefix APS. These four procedures
perform the same functions as procedures with the same name in the OSI/AS API.
•
Module file management procedures. When your program operates in nowait
mode—allowing it to continue processing rather than wait for an I/O completion—
you use the module file management procedures to receive completion information
for I/O requests. These procedures begin with the prefix MFM.
It also includes files of predefined data structures for use with the procedures.
You can write FTAM applications in either the C or Transaction Application Language
(TAL) programming language.