Transaction support using unit of work modeling in the context of MDA

Transactions are an important part of most enterprise computing systems. Sometimes they are supported by DBMS and sometimes by transaction monitors. In either case, they are part of the platform used by application developers. A platform independent model of enterprise computing must abstract away transactions and provide platform independent ways of describing them. This paper shows how "unit of work" can be used to support platform independent descriptions of enterprise computing systems that use transactions. Our paper is in the context of the OMG's model driven architecture so we provide a UML profile for describing unit of work. We have developed a tool, Mercator, that can translate platform independent models using the unit of work profile to platform dependent models using transactions. When added to our previous work on persistence, this provides a general way of handling transparent transaction management in MDA.