A framework for ensuring consistency of Web Services Transactions

For efficiently managing Web Services (WS) transactions which are executed across multiple loosely-coupled autonomous organizations, isolation is commonly relaxed. A Web service operation of a transaction releases locks on its resources once its jobs are completed without waiting for the completions of other operations. However, those early unlocked resources can be seen by other transactions, which can spoil data integrity and cause incorrect outcomes. Existing WS transaction standards do not consider this problem. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to ensure the consistent executions of isolation-relaxing WS transactions. The mechanism effectively detects inconsistent states of transactions with a notion of an end-state dependency and recovers them to consistent states. We also propose a new Web services Transaction Dependency management Protocol (WTDP). WTDP helps organizations manage the WS transactions easily without data inconsistency. WTDP is designed to be compliant with a representative WS transaction standard, the Web Services Transactions specifications, for easy integration into existing WS transaction systems. We prototyped a WTDP-based WS transaction management system to validate our protocol. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.