Distributed Transactions in Java

The Web frequently suffers from failures which can affect both the performance and consistency of applications running over it. For example, if a user purchases a cookie (a token) granting access to a newspaper site, it is important that the cookie is deli vered and stored if the user’s account is debited; a failure could prevent either from occurring, and leave the system in an indeterminate state. For resources such as documents, failures may simply be annoying to users; for commercial services, they can result in loss of revenue and credibilit y.