A formal specification strategy for electronic commerce

Most current Web applications perform operations that are basically read-only (retrieval of data/documents), so conflicts between transactions do not arise. However as Web applications increasingly become more sophisticated, permitting both concurrent data retrieval and update operations to remote databases, the potentials for conflicts between transactions becomes very high. Therefore, we must ensure correct transaction operation and the correct synchronization of concurrent transactions to avoid deadlock and ensure correctness. The paper presents a formal specification methodology based on the concept of concurrent execution that provides automatic communication and synchronization mechanisms between concurrent processes. The paper explores the issues of correctness, reliability, and recovery of data distributed across the enterprise, describes techniques for guaranteeing and enhancing correctness and procedures for recovering transactions and data in case of any transaction failures to guarantee a high degree of system dependability. Formal methods simplify the writing of concurrent programs by taking most of the burden of synchronization away from the programmer. Further specifying transaction systems formally, enhances application quality and reliability by verifying the functionalities of applications and the correctness of data.