Integrating transaction services into Web-based software development environments

Software Development Environments (SDEs) require sophisticated database transaction models dire to the long-duration interactive, and cooperative nature of software engineering activities. Such Extended Transaction Models (ETMs) have been proposed and implemented by building application-specific, dedicated databases for the SDEs. With the development of the World Wide Web (WWW), there have been a number of efforts to build SDEs on top of the WWW. The idea is to use the web sewers as a huge distributed database to store the software artifacts and related materials. Therefore we are facing a new challenge: how to implement the ETMs in such web-based SDEs without requiring the web sewers to be modified according to rite needs of the specific SDEs, since different SDEs may use the same web server This paper presents our experiences integrating transaction services into web-based SDEs. We evolved from the traditional approach of building a transaction management component that operated on dedicated databases to the e.uternnl transaction server approach. A transaction server, called JPernLite, was built to operate independently of the web servers and provide the necessary extensibility for SDEs to implement their ETMs. The transaction server can be integrated into the SDE via a number of interfaces, and we discuss the pros and cons of each alternative in derail.