An examination of the transition of the Arjuna distributed transaction processing software from research to products

The Arjuna transaction system began life in the mid 1980s as an academic project to examine the use of object-oriented techniques in the development of fault-tolerant systems; over 15 years later it is now a Hewlett-Packard product in its own right and is also embedded in several other offerings from HP. In addition, many of the original developers of Arjuna have accompanied the system on its journey and had first hand experience in taking this academic research vehicle into a commercial environment. At times the transition has been neither easy nor smooth but it has been interesting from many different perspectives. In this paper we shall attempt to give an overview of how this occurred and illustrate some of the lessons we have learned over the years.