The Transaction Internet Protocol in practice: reliability for WWW applications

One of the most interesting domains of future Internet applications will be located in the area of electronic commerce, where online products and services are offered. Products of value are accounted by monetary transactions, involving a bank or credit card service to handle the electronic cash flow. To achieve a reliable and consistent flow of information in these applications, the concept of transactions has been proven to be the right choice. With the standardization of Transaction Internet Protocol (TIP) there is now a protocol available for the synchronization of distributed Internet applications dealing with transactions. We give a detailed overview of TIP and how it can be integrated in electronic commerce applications on the WWW. We have implemented the current version of TIP (3.0) in Java. Based on this TIP implementation we developed an electronic shopping mall application for the usage in the WWW.