The present invention extends the programming model of OTS by providing a unique model that offers both flexibility and ease of use. This model separates the transactional behavior of CORBA method from the IDL interface. The transactional behavior of the CORBA method is specified in a deployment descriptor file. Each method is associated with a transactional policy. The server reads the policies of the methods during deployment time and makes decisions of making the method transactional based on the policy. Changing the transactional policy of a method is as easy as modifying the deployment descriptor and redeploying the server. If either of the two usage models that OTS offers is used, making a method transactional means that the IDL interface has to change, causing all the software components in the system to re-compile. With the present invention, such a change can be accomplished without need for such recompilation.