Flexible specification of interoperable transactions

摘要

Interoperable transactions differ from traditional transactions in their longer time-span and the central place of communication and interaction. Specification of interoperable transactions should be flexible in the sense that the scheduling aspects for a transaction should be decoupled from the communication aspects as well as being reactive to failures. During the execution of an interoperable transaction, steps have to be rolled back, or compensated, and sometimes different alternatives must be tried and negotiated to fulfil the given task instead of aborting the whole transaction. In this paper, we propose a separation of the specification of communication aspects, the scheduling aspects and the failures aspects of interoperable transactions to achieve extra flexibility. Of particular importance is the introduction of Contracts for specifying and managing failures in interoperable systems and Tasks for managing the execution strategies of interoperable transactions.