These are not the only frameworks you would need for business objects, but are representative of the more business-specific ones. I am always looking for partners, so if you are interested in using or building a framework like this, please let me know. Business Transaction Processing Business transactions are different from database transactions. They are the sort of transactions that a businessman would care about, like checks, sales receipts, and timecards. A business transaction processing system is a system like payroll, sales processing, inventory, or accounting, which has a model of the business that is changed only when a business transaction occurs.
Business transactions are objects and are saved as part of a complete audit trail.
See my patterns for Transactions and Accounts and the work that Hiroaki Nakamura is doing on a framework based on the REA model . Earlier, we built a framework called Accounts . A key to both of these systems is representing business rules as objects that can be stored in a database and changed without changing any code. In the summer of 1997 I ran a workshop on business transactions. Although a lot of work has been done on workflow system, most of it does not seem to have been designed for object-oriented systems.