Compensation in the World of Web Services Composition

摘要

Industry and researchers acknowledge Web services as being the next generation of distributed computing. However, several issues especially the reliability aspect needs to be addressed before Web services can deliver its promise. Due to their heterogeneous, autonomous and long-lived nature, traditional ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Integrity, Durability) based models are not sufficient for providing transactional guarantee to Web services compositions. To overcome this limitation, many extended transaction models have been proposed based on the concept of compensation. In this paper, we stress on the importance of two aspects, the Cost of Compensation and End User Involvement, which are missing from most of the transaction models proposed until now. We also show how industry standards like BPEL4WS, WS-Transaction can be augmented to facilitate the above aspects. Finally, we propose a simple classification towards describing compensating operations.