Transform: A Transaction Safe Web Application Model

Classical models of database-driven web applications follow thin-client architectures, i.e., all data processing and business logic resides on the server while the client’s role is to arrange and display the user interface. When transactions come into play, which may naturally span several consecutive interactions between client pages and server actions, problems arise since transactions cannot exceed the boundaries of server actions. We address this issue by proposing a novel architecture for web applications, where a webservice-based data access component is integrated directly in the markup of a client page. Our approach guarantees ACID transaction properties and generates serializable histories in the sense of conflict serializability. In contrast to past efforts to transaction management in web applications, our architecture does not necessitate the existence of an additional, external transaction server.