Constructing Reliable Web Applications Using Atomic Actions

The Web frequently suffers from failures which affect the performance and consistency of applications run over it. An important fault-tolerance technique is the use of atomic actions (atomic transactions) for controlling operations on services. Atomic actions guarantee the consistency of applications despite concurrent accesses and failures. Techniques for implementing transactions on distributed objects are well-known: in order to become “transaction aware”, an object requires facilities for concurrency control, persistence, and the ability to participate in a commit protocol. While it is possible to make server-side applications transactional, browsers typically do not possess such facilities, a situation which is likely to persist for the foreseeable future. Therefore, the browser will not normally be able to take part in transactional applications. The paper presents a design and implementation of a scheme that does permit non-transactional browsers to participate in transactional applications, thereby providing much needed end-to-end transactional guarantees.