Open Multithreaded Transactions: A Transaction Model for Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming

This book investigates how transactions can be integrated with concurrent object-oriented programming, and how transactions can be made available to an application programmer at the programming language level. The book gives a detailed overview of existing transaction models, and analyzes their suitability for concurrent programming languages. A new transaction model named "Open Multithreaded Transactions" is presented. It provides features for controlling and structuring not only access to objects, as usual in transaction systems, but also threads taking part in transactions. Integration with exception handling makes open multithreaded transactions ideal building blocks for fault-tolerant applications. The book also describes the design of an object-oriented framework providing the necessary run-time support for open multithreaded transactions. Procedural, object-oriented and aspect-oriented interfaces for the application programmer are presented. Programming examples include code in Ada, Java and AspectJ.