Chapter 17: Distributed Transactions

Communication between diverse applications is an essential requirement in today's distributed network environments. This communication can be at a single tier where one application communicates to another in a single transaction, or at a multiple tiers where many applications communicating to each other in one large transaction. The ability of a transaction to span multiple applications is fundamental to multi-process communication.
The availability of low-cost computing power and increased network bandwidth gives rise to distributed component-based computing applications. Distributed computing applications and distributed transactions are vital for developing computing components for multi-tier applications, which can run on different platforms or through networks. Here, a transaction is defined as a unit of work composed of sets of operations on objects. A distributed component-based application is a configuration of services provided by different application components. These components are executed on physically independent systems running on multiple machines. To the user, these components appear as a single application running on a single physical machine.