We set the basis for a theory of testing for distributed transactions in service oriented systems where each service definition is decorated with a transactional attribute (inspired by the Java Transaction API). Transaction attributes discipline how services are executed with respect to the transactional scope of the invoking party. We define a language of observers and show that, in general, t...

INTRODUCTION Young women aged 15 to 24 years in sub-Saharan Africa continue to be disproportionately affected by HIV. A growing number of studies have suggested that the practice of transactional sex may in part explain women's heightened risk, but evidence on the association between transactional sex and HIV has not yet been synthesized. We set out to systematically review studies that assess ...

Structured Transaction Definition Language (STDL) is a language for distributed transaction processing, developed by the Multivendor Integration Architecture consortium. STDL is a block-structured language, specialized for transaction processing. It is designed for application portability across multiple STDL implementations on different vendors’ transaction processing systems. This paper descr...

Composite systems are collections of autonomous, heterogeneous, and distributed software applications. In these systems, data dependencies are continuously violated by local operations and therefore, coordination processes are necessary to guarantee overall correctness and consistency. Such coordination processes must be endowed with some form of execution guarantees, which require the particip...

With single thread performance hitting the power wall, hardware architects have turned to chip-level multiprocessing to increase processor performance. As a result, issues related to the construction of scalable and reliable multi-threaded applications have become increasingly important. One of the most pressing problems in concurrent programming has been synchronizing accesses to shared data a...

As new trends in computer architecture lead towards shared-memory chip multiprocessors (CMP), the rules for programming these machines are significantly changing. In the search for alternatives to deadlock-prone lock-based concurrency protocols, Software Transactional Memory (STM) extensions to Haskell have provided an easy-to-use lock-free abstraction mechanism for concurrent programming, usin...