Auction system design using open multithreaded transactions

Open Multithreaded Transactions form an advanced transaction model that provides features for controlling and structuring not only accesses to objects, as usual in transaction systems, but also threads taking part in transactions. The model allows several threads to enter the same transaction in order to perform a joint activity. It provides a flexible way of manipulating threads executing inside a transaction by allowing them to be forked and terminated, but it restricts their behavior in order to guarantee correctness of transaction nesting and isolation among transactions. In addition, transactions are exception handling contexts, and the model therefore provides forward and backward error recovery. In this paper we show that the model is indeed powerful, and that a complex application, i.e. an online auction system, can be designed and implemented in a very elegant way.