A reservation-based coordination protocol for web services

Traditional transaction semantics are not appropriate for business activities that involve long-running transactions in a loosely-coupled distributed environment, in particular, for Web Services that operate between different enterprises over the Internet. In this paper we describe a novel reservation-based extended transaction protocol that can be used to coordinate such business activities. The protocol avoids the use of compensating transactions, which can result in undesirable effects. In our protocol, each task within a business activity is executed as two steps. The first step involves an explicit reservation of resources. The second step involves the confirmation or cancellation of the reservation. Each step is executed as a separate traditional short-running transaction. We show how our protocol can be implemented as a reservation protocol on top of the Web Services Transaction specification or, alternatively, as a coordination protocol on top of the Web Services Coordination specification.