Introducting WS-Transaction

Abstract

In July 2002, BEA, IBM, and Microsoft released a trio of specifications designed to support business transactions over Web services. These specifications, BPEL4WS, WS-Transaction, and WS-Coordination, together form the bedrock for reliably choreographing Web services-based applications, providing business process management, transactional integrity, and generic coordination facilities respectively. In our previous article, we introduced WS-Coordination, a generic coordination framework for Web services and showed how the WS-Coordination protocol can be augmented to support coordination in arbitrary application domains. This article introduces the first publicly available WS-Coordination based protocol: Web Services Transaction, and shows how WS-Transaction provides atomic transactional coordination for Web services.