Towards a Transactional Framework Derived from Real Workflows

One fundamental issue that has yet to he adequately addressed in loosely coupled distributed systems is long duration transactions — maintaining integrity of the system in the presence of both failures and concurrent activities for processes that last from seconds to years. This issue is of particular importance to both business-to-business integration (B2Bi) and enterprise application integration (EAI) applications such as e-procurement.Numerous transaction models have been proposed in the past to address this issue. They include transactions with ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) properties designed for short duration transactions (lasting milliseconds), compensation transactions and other advanced/extended transaction models. For varying reasons such as performances, expressiveness and appropriateness, existing transaction models do not meet general requirements for long duration transactions in loosely coupled distributed systems especially B2Bi and EAI applications.This position paper has two main objectives. First, we describe anapplication that is based on a real e-procurement scenario and discuss its transactional requirements. In the discussion, we highlight why some existing advanced/extended transaction model fail to provide adequate transactional support for this particular application. Second, we informally describe an expressive framework that captures, declaratively, the transactional requirements of long duration transaction.