Issues in the development of transactional web applications

Abstract

The establishment of the Web application as a successful application model may be attributed to its adherence to open standards, to the powerful J2EE™ application framework for the execution of business and process logic, and to its integration with heterogeneous external systems, transactional processes, and Web technologies. In addition, effective tool support has enabled rapid development and deployment, powerful processes composed from components, and access to a steadily increasing range of function. Many Web applications are designed for high performance, scalability, and highly reliable utilization and are capable of extending modes of usage and growing throughput. Successful application development in these environments involves bridging the gap between exercising available programming specifications and the proper design, coding, and life-cycle management of the application. This paper addresses issues, transactional and nontransactional, in application development that are important for the successful deployment and execution of enterprise Web applications in production environments. These issues are based on experience with deployments of Web applications in various customer environments and are not new, but are either fundamental to previous transactional systems or have appeared in other classes of applications. Understanding these issues is essential both to building effective tooling to support the runtimes and to the evolution and definition of the runtimes themselves. © 2004 by International Business Machines Corporation.