can stand for D esk T op P ublishing or D istributed T ransaction P rocessing. Anthony Frey on Network Computing Online, October 24, 1997 compares four middleware DTP monitors and states the following at http://techweb.cmp.com/nc/820/820r1.html
If someone told you Microsoft Windows 2000 is a better application server than Novell NetWare or Unix, what kind of applications would they be talking about? Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes? No. Oracle? Not likely. A Web server? Definitely not. In most cases these folks are refering to distributed transaction processing (DTP) monitors. When networking vendors claim "one billion transactions per day" or quote Transaction Processing Council TPC-C benchmark results, they're talking about DTP.
These often-overlooked middleware packages provide the essential communications and other services that enable business logic to be hosted on distributed servers in the middle tier. This business logic is made up of real applications--applications that are vital to most enterprise line-of-business operations. DTP monitors ensure complete transactional integrity for transactions between distributed relational database management systems (RDBMSes). Perhaps more than any other type of middleware, DTP monitors have enabled true three-tier client/server computing.
See also Database and Middleware .