Authors:
Charles A Shoniregun
1
;
Ziyang Duan
2
;
Subhra Bose
2
and
Alex Logvynovskiy
3
Affiliations:
1
School of Computing and Technology, University of East London, United Kingdom
;
2
Reuters America Inc., United States
;
3
Business,Computing and Information Management (BCIM), London South Bank University, United Kingdom
Keyword(s):
ACID, data modelling, NML, STM, web service, XML.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Communication and Software Infrastructure
;
e-Business
;
e-Commerce and e-Business: B2B and B2C
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Global Communication Information Systems and Services
;
Information and Systems Security
;
Telecommunications
;
Unified Communications and Enhanced Services
Abstract:
A business object is a set of well-structured, persistent data associated with some predefined transactional operations. Maintaining the transactional correctness of business objects is very important, especially in financial applications. The object’s correctness has to be guaranteed at any time during the lifecycle of the object. This requires that each simple operation is correct, i.e., satisfies the ACID property, and the object is in acceptable states before and after each operation. The correctness of each simple transaction can be secured and guaranteed by using a transactional database or a transaction monitor. However, the combined effect of executing a set of simple transactions may violate some business rules and leave the object in an unacceptable state. The proposed model is based on Heirarchical Statechart to specify the allowable states and transitions on a business object during its life cycle. The paper describes an XML-based framework to support application developm
ent based on this model. The framework includes an XML language for model specification, a set of tools for model definition, testing and simulation, and a set of APIs to provide business object management functionalities at runtime. The model and framework allows secure transactional properties of a business object to be defined formally and declaratively, and provides correctness guarantees at runtime. The framework facilitates fast product development and integration in a service-oriented architectural model, and provides great flexibilities for persisting data in either XML or relational databases. The experience of how to use the framework in developing a financial transactions system and the tradeoffs is based on comparison between XML and relational databases.
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