Transactional Properties of Complex Web Services

Transactional Properties of Complex Web Services

Li Li (Southwest University of China, China), Chengfei Liu (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia), Xiaohui Zhao (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia ) and Junhu Wang (Griffith University, Australia)
Copyright: © 2011 |Pages: 14
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-819-7.ch002

Abstract

Web services have become a dominating technology for business integration. For operation reliability and robustness, transactional support is an important issue for Web service system design and development. Yet, most existing Web services protocols, like WS-BPEL which sticks to the compensation-based recovery strategy, only provide very limited supports for Web services in certain circumstances. As Web service systems are scaling up, more advanced transactional supports beyond traditional compensation-based solutions are required to catch up with the increasing complexity of composite Web services. This chapter looks into the problem of transactional support for composing and scheduling those Web services that may have different transactional properties. The transactional properties of workflow constructs, which are fundamental to the composition of Web services, are thoroughly investigated. The concept of connection point is introduced to derive the transactional properties of composite Web services. The scheduling issue of composite Web services is also discussed.
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Works On Web Service Transactions

Ensuring reliability of composite services is challenging. In addition to the latest release of WS-BPEL (the latest successor of the arguably de facto standard WS-BPEL 1.1) (Andrews et al., 2003), there are several other known proposals to extend the Web service with transaction-processing capabilities. They include the following emerged proposals, which define transaction protocols between composed services: the Web Services Transactions Specifications, 2005, the OASIS Business Transactions TC, 2004, the Tentative Hold Protocol Part 1: White Paper, 2001 and Tentative Hold Protocol Part 2: Technical Specification, 2001 from W3C, and the OASIS Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) TC, 2004, which is designed to be used independently or together with other transaction protocols. The WS-CAF is the superset of WSC, WS-T, and WS-BA. Other main lines of research have attempted to extend some aspects of these proposals, or propose better strategies to cope with transactional issues in complex business activities. The following are some details.

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