TRANSFER Programming Manual

Clients and Agents Compared
TRANSFER Application Components
40970 Tandem Computers Incorporated 2–7
An interfacing agent that supports the transmittal of packages between a Tandem
network and a network consisting of systems furnished by other manufacturers.
The sender of the mail, at a Tandem system node, specifies the external mail
address of the recipient in a suffix appended to the recipient's name. The agent
then uses the suffix to address the package, entering it for delivery in the other
system. The application might, in fact, use the interchange formats currently
recommended by the National Bureau of Standards as a basis for these operations.
Clients and Agents
Compared
Clients and agents sometimes perform many of the same functions and thus are not
always distinct from one another. They are, however, treated separately in this
manual because they usually differ in design and coding considerations. The
fundamental distinction between clients and agents is:
Clients take their control information either from user processes or from other
processes that are not part of the TRANSFER delivery system. Clients direct most
of their output to the TRANSFER delivery system.
Agents take their control information from the TRANSFER delivery system and
the received packages that trigger them. Agents direct output to processes or
devices external to the TRANSFER delivery system or back into the TRANSFER
delivery system itself.