COMBINING OBJECT-ORIENTED SYSTEMS AND OPEN TRANSACTION PROCESSING

Atomic transactions are now a familiar paradigm for distributed progra mming and have been provided in a number of object-oriented languages. Much effort has also been expended on developing open transaction pro cessing systems which support distributed transactions involving multi -vendor database systems. This paper addresses a number of issues that arise in combining object-oriented distributed programming with open transaction processing. We describe an approach to supporting transact ions which can access objects and other resource types, such as files and records, consistently, and which is independent of the use of any particular object-oriented programming language. We discuss both the d esign of a generic run-time interface which provides language independ ent support for atomic objects and transactions and, following the X/O pen model for open transaction processing, the design of an interface between the transaction manager and a resource manager which is suitab le for the requirements of object-oriented systems. We illustrate our approach by describing the transaction sub-system of the Amadeus/RelaX implementation of the Comandos platform which supports a number of po pular object-oriented languages and has been integrated with an existi ng relational database system.