The Dependency Manager: a base service for transactional workflowmanagement

摘要

The management of long lived applications is a great challenge totransaction processing systems. On the other side, workflow managementsystems (WFMS) provide mechanisms for basic navigation andsynchronization of activities in workflows. However, WFMS do not allowreliable execution of transactional workflows since they have noprovisions for activity coordination. We introduce the dependencymanager (DM) which implements a mechanism for reliable synchronizationand coordination of the state transitions of generic activities. The DMis designed as a new component of an extended X/Open architecture, whichoffers its services to both workflow management and transactionprocessing systems