Our Work on distributed transactions is build around the peer-to-peer model. The peer-to-peer (P2P) transactional environment supports a general model of distributed computation. The application programs are distributed and cooperate, as equals, to execute the transactions of a distributed computation. It is a different and a more general model than that supported in the Client-Server (C/S) paradigm. This richness, however, has certain ramifications in most modules that support a distributed transactional environment. The peer-to-peer model affects the transactional paradigm, the communication paradigm, transaction management, and commit processing as well as other related functions. Work on this area originated from IBM Research Triangle Park and during my stay at IBM I have contributed in every aspect of this model's development. Finally, in 1994 an IBM book publication, authored by myself, A. Citron and k. Britton, presented the complete P2P transactional architecture embedded in IBM's SNA communication protocol. This architecture is being implemented by all IBM's and some non-IBM industrial transactional offerings. In "The Peer-to-Peer Cooperative Distributed Transactional Environment" we describe that work in an SNA independed manner providing insights and comparisons to the client-server model. We present a comprehensive study of IBM's peer-to-peer distributed transactional environment. This includes discussion of the peer-to-peer transactional model and its approach towards the new challenges posed by this widely-used paradigm. The paper, also shows that the peer-to-peer can be thought of as a distributed cooperative operating environment. Other parts of our work describing how the peer-to-peer handles certain transactional modules (i.e., transaction identifier management) can be found in the last two references below while other modules such as the description of IBM's PN commit protocol and transactional negotiation protocols are in the pipeline. The work in this area gave also birth to the following research topics.

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