We have now seen the reasons why we need transaction processing systems. The advantages of three-tier applications in creating scalable and robust applications are made feasible by transaction processing systems. The ability to distribute the components that make up applications amongst separate servers without explicitly having to develop for that architecture is another advantage of transaction server processing. Transaction processing systems also ensure that transactions are atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable. This alleviates the developer from having to support these characteristics explicitly.
With all of these excellent reasons for developing an application that uses a transaction processing system, we now need a system that provides these features. We will now turn our attention to a transaction processing system that is part of the standard IIS 4.0 installation: Microsoft Transaction Server.