DataWeb Transactions - Transaction Support for DataWeb Transactions

Web-based information systems no longer aim at purely providing read-only access to information in terms of static HTML pages. Rather, more and more web-based information systems store (part of) the information within a database system (DBS) and generateHTML pages on demand [Flor98]. Different users interact with the system, and often they perform changes concurrently. As an example in the area of electronic commerce, consider a web-based tourism information system, where tourists are allowed to book various tourism facilities. These facilities are concurrently maintained by different content providers within an Extranet using a web-based interface [Ponc97, Pröl98]. In such a scenario, consistency and reliability become a major concern. To cope with these requirements, traditional information systems employ the well-established concept of transactions, which are usually provided by an underlying DBS [Gray92]. Note, that, this kind of transactions, which are also known as database transactions, can be seen as a subset of so called electronic commerce transactions, or business transactions. The latter cover a much broader range of aspects, such as financial and security issues [Schm98]. Whereas these other aspects are discussed in literature, very few work can be found on the database transaction aspect of electronic commerce transactions and of web-based information systems in general. The objective of this project is to overcome this deficiency by developing transaction architectures for web-based information systems incorporating databases. This kind of information system is furtheron called DataWeb Applications.