Achieving Atomicity for Web Services Using Commutativity of Actions

Web Services enable the creation of complex business activities through the cooperation of independently developed software programs. However, Web Services incur the risk of long delays and locked data when using the classical distributed transaction strategy, and the risk of inconsistency when using the compensating transactions strategy. If the benefits of Web Services are to be fully realized, a better strategy must be employed. In this paper we describe an extended transactions strategy that can be used in conjunction with existing Web Services infrastructures, and that is compatible with existing business practices. The strategy exploits local transactions and commutativity of local actions at each data item to achieve global atomicity for business activities.