The Structured Transaction Definition Language (STDL) is a language-based programming interface to transactional protocols and runtime systems. STDL isolates within the language transaction processing features, allowing an implementation to hide underlying communications mechanisms, like TxRPC and CORBA/OTS, from the programmer. Because of its design centre in distributed processing, STDL already includes many features of object-oriented systems. Completing the transformation to an object-oriented language provides a migration path from procedure-oriented TP to object-oriented TP and simplifies the substitution of object-oriented communication managers.
This paper describes how the concept of STDL is used in the ACTranS project for portability and interoperability of heterogeneous Distributed Transaction Processing Systems, including the support of object-oriented TP systems.