Fundamentals of Transaction Management in Enterprise Application Architectures

Transaction management is a key issue in the development of enterprise application. During the payment of purchases, when dealing with bank operations or when making hotel reservations, transactions are everywhere. Curricula recommendations mainly consider specific knowledge units for transactions in the context of information management knowledge area. Thus, from a curricular point of view, transactions are usually related to Database Management Systems (DBMS). However, in the development of enterprise applications, designers and programmers use frameworks that manage transactions from the business tier. Therefore, there is a significant gap between the concept of transaction usually presented in degree courses and the real use of transactions made during the development of enterprise applications. There are excellent books that provide detailed descriptions of the transactional management in enterprise application from the business tier, but these are detailed and complex books beyond the reach of most students and, what is worse, beyond the reach of those lecturers without a significant background both in DBMS and enterprise application architectures. This paper provides a core of knowledge distilled from these books, as well as some examples of transactional architectures used in the grade software engineering courses taught by the author. The main goal is to describe in detail a knowledge unit focused on what I have called service transactions that helps to fill the gap between the learning outcomes provided in university courses and the use of transactions made in enterprise application development.