Transactional Attitudes

Introduction

The Web services platform offers a distributed computing environment where autonomous applications interact using standard Internet technology. In this environment, diverse applications and systems become the components of intra- and inter-enterprise integration. Yet, transactional reliability, an often critical requirement on such integration, is presently missing from the Web services platform.

This project proposes the TxA framework as an approach to Web service reliability. The TxA framework introduces transactional attitudes to explicitly describe the otherwise implicit transactional semantics, capabilities, and requirements of individual applications. These explicit transactional attitude descriptions are used by a middleware system to automate the reliable composition of applications into larger Web transactions, while maintaining autonomy of the individual applications.

To support the variety of transaction models likely to emerge as businesses deploy solutions on the Web, we believe that a general-purpose coordination framework, such as TxA, will be critical. TxA offers the flexibility to coordinate participants with varying transactional capabilities, using standard transport protocols (such as SOAP), without compromising the autonomy of those participants.

For more information about Transactional Attitudes, please see the paper "Transactional Attitudes: Reliable Composition of Autonomous Web Services", Thomas Mikalsen, Stefan Tai, Isabelle Rouvellou. Workshop on Dependable Middleware-based Systems (WDMS 2002), part of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2002), Washington D.C., June 2002.

People

The Transactional Attitudes (TxA) project is a joint effort by Thomas Mikalsen, Isabelle Rouvellou, and Stefan Tai of the Advanced Enterprise Middleware group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, New York, USA.

More

For more information on this project, please contact Thomas Mikalsen (tommi@us.ibm.com).