Transaction processing of distributed objects with declarative transactional attributes

The present invention relates to a server application-programming model using software components, and more particularly relates to transaction processing with the server application components. A component-based framework includes system services and component integration interfaces that provide a run-time environment which automatically processes work of component-based server applications in transactions according to transactional rules or behaviors declaratively specified to apply to the respective components. A transaction attribute is declaratively specified for a server application component that represents whether the component requires execution in a transaction. When a client requests creation of a server application component without having first initiated a transaction and the component's transaction attribute indicates a transaction is required, the framework automatically initiates a transaction in which to run the server application component. The framework also completes the automatically initiated transaction upon receiving an indication from the server application component that its transactional work is complete.