CAGISTrans: Providing Adaptable Transactional Support for Cooperative Work – an Extended Treatment

The theme of this paper is on transactional support for cooperative work environments, focusing on data sharing – i.e., providing suitable mechanisms to manage concurrent access to shared resources. The subject is not new per se. In fact, in terms of transaction models and frameworks, several solutions already exist. Still, there are some problems that are not solved. Among these are the problems that result from the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of cooperative work. Our solution is to provide transactional support that not only can be tailored to suit different situations, but can also be modified following changes in the actual environment while the work is being performed – i.e., adaptable transactional support. As part of this, we have identified and extracted the beneficial features from existing models and attempted to extend these to form a transactional framework, called CAGISTrans. This is a framework for the specification of transaction models suiting specific applications. To handle dynamic environments we propose a new way of organizing the elements of a transaction model to allow runtime refinement. In addition, we have developed a transaction management system, built on the middleware principle, to allow interoperability and database independence. Thus this addresses the problems induced by the heterogeneous nature of cooperative environments.