AN INTERFACE TO SUPPORT STATE DEPENDENT WEB APPLICATIONS ACCESSING A RELATIONAL DATABASE

Many web applications require access to a relational database. The requirements of such web applications are different from conventional applications that access a database. Web applications need to have selective recoverability and need to have support for different transaction structures, other than the flat transaction structure of conventional database applications, including nested and chained transactions. To achieve this, an interface between the application and database has the following functional features: 1) the interface to the database is connection oriented, i.e., the connection is retained across several invocations of the application; 2) the backend of the interface is long living, i.e., it exists across multiple invocations; 3) state information about a session in progress is maintained, and more specifically, it is distributed between the backend of the interface and the hidden fields of the HTML output document.