Transactional Middleware

Synonyms

Application server; Object monitor; TP monitor; Transaction manager; Transaction service

Definition

Transactional Middleware is a generic term used to refer to the IT infrastructure that supports the execution of electronic transactions in a distributed setting. The best known form of transactional middleware is Transaction Processing Monitors (TP Monitors or TPM), which have been around for more than three decades (e.g., CICS of IBM). Today, TP Monitors are at the heart of most application servers and are a key component of any enterprise computing architecture. The main role of these systems is to run transactions, i.e., to support the illusion that certain distributed operations are executed atomically. This makes the design of complex systems easier for the programmer, who does not need to implement this functionality but can rely on the transactional middleware to ensure that groups of operations are executed in their entirety or not all, with the transactional middleware...