Abstract: A programming model for component-based server applications provides declarative and programmatic access control at development without knowledge of the security configuration at deployment. The developer defines the server application access control by defining logical classes of users, called roles. The developer also can declare access privileges of the roles at package, component and interface levels of the server application. At development, the roles are bound to the particular security configuration of the server computer. The programming model also provides application programming and integration interfaces with which the developer can programmatically define access control of the roles to the server application's processing services.

Abstract: A run-time environment implemented as system services and component integration interfaces provides a capability for components of a component-based server application to reversibly disable committal of a transaction in which the component participates. On return from a call to the component which leaves the component's transactional work in an invalid state, the component can disable commit of the transaction so as to avoid premature committal of the component's transactional work. On return from a call to the component which renders the component's transactional work in a valid state, the component re-enables commit of the transaction. If committal of the transaction is initiated when any component in the transaction disables commit, the transaction is aborted.

Abstract: A component-based framework includes system services and component integration interfaces that provide a run-time environment which automatically provides transactions to encompass work of component-based server applications according to the transactional expectations of individual server application components. A transaction attribute is associated with each 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.