Transaction Support for DataWeb Applications - A Requirement's Perspective

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 generate HTML pages on demand. Such information systems are often called DataWeb Applications. 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 an unpredictable number of a priori unknown tourists are allowed to book various tourism facilities at the same time. Whereas financial and security issues of such electronic commerce transactions are extensively discussed in literature, very few work exists on the database transaction aspect in terms of consistency and reliability of electronic commerce transactions and of DataWeb applications in general. The objective of this paper is to discuss the specific requirements that different architectures of DataWeb applications and the web itself pose on transaction management, and to identify promising technologies for enabling web transaction services.