Developing a class hierarchy for object-oriented transaction processing

This paper describes the development of a class hierarchy to support distributed transaction processing. Inheritance and polymorphism, key features of the object oriented programming model, have been used to develop a hierarchy of classes which convey to their subclasses the behaviours of persistence, concurrency-control, recoverability and identity necessary for distributed transaction processing. The development is traced from the requirements of distributed transaction processing to the definition of classes supporting these key properties. The system is interesting in both its development and its results. The development, not based on any rigourous design methodology, illustrates some of the design decisions unique to object-oriented systems. The resulting class hierarchy provides a flexible, object-oriented interface for reliable distributed programming. The paper includes a step-by-step description of the design of the classes and the class hierarchy.