Integrating the Object Transaction Service with the Web

The World Wide Web frequently suffers from failures which can affect both the performance and consistency of applications running over it. For resources such as documents, failures may simply be annoying to users; for commercial services, they can result in loss of revenue and credibility. Atomic transactions are a well-known technique for guaranteeing application consistency in the presence of failures. However, their use within Web applications is currently limited to Web servers; browsers are not included, despite their role becoming more significant in electronic commerce applications. With the advent of Java, it is possible to empower browsers so that they can fully participate within transactional applications. However, requiring a browser to incorporate a full transaction processing system for all applications would impose an overhead on all users. Therefore, in this paper, we show how the interfaces defined by the OMG's Object Transaction System can be used to provide a lightweight solution to obtaining end-to-end transactional requirements. We illustrate this technique with a worked example.