TRANSACTION REPLICATION SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SUPPORTING REPLICATED TRANSACTION-BASED SERVICES

A generic transaction replication service receives update transactions from individual application servers, and forwards the update transactions for processing to all application servers that run the same service application, thereby enabling each application server to maintain a replicated copy of service content data. Upon receiving an update transaction, the application servers perform the specified update, and asynchronously report back to the transaction replication service on the "success" or "failure" of the transaction. When inconsistent transaction results are reported by different application servers, the transaction replication service uses a voting scheme to decide which application servers are to be deemed "consistent," and takes inconsistent application servers off-line for maintenance. Each update transaction replicated by the transaction replication service is stored in a transaction log. When a new application server is brought on-line, previously-dispatched update transactions stored in the transaction log are dispatched in sequence to the new server to bring the new server's content data up-to-date.