WS-TX 1.1 standard announcement

Posted by Mark Little on May 23, 2007

Sections

Architecture & Design,

Enterprise Architecture

Topics

Transactions Processing ,

SOA ,

Web Services

Tags

WS-BusinessActivity ,

WS-AtomicTransactions ,

Transactions ,

WS-Coordination ,

Web services

We announced in April that the members OASIS had finished voting to accept WS-TX 1.1 (WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity) as a standard. The official announcement took a little while to come out, but it's now official. As the announcement states:

OASIS, the international standards consortium, today announced that its members have approved Web Services Transaction (WS-Transaction) version 1.1 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. WS-Transaction describes an extensible framework for providing protocols that coordinate the actions of distributed applications. Such coordination protocols can be used to support a wide variety of applications that require consistent agreement on the outcome of distributed transactions. WS-Transaction is offered on a Royalty-Free basis, as provided under OASIS policies.

Eric Newcomer, CTO if IONA Technologies and co-chair of the committee had this to say

"Web services increasingly tie together large numbers of participants to form distributed applications. The result can be extremely complex. WS-Transaction gives developers the framework they need to build reliable, distributed applications."

On his blog, Eric shows how long it has taken in some respects to get to this stage. We've covered the history in more depth before, but transactions are a very important service in all computing environments, so it is good to see them finally standardised in Web Service. Ian Robinson, from IBM and the other committee co-chair recognized the history behind WS-TX:

"The technical committee recognized that there is no single transaction model appropriate for all use cases, and so WS-Transaction defines an extensible coordination framework that accommodates classic two-phase-commit, as well as more relaxed forms of transactions with isolation behavior appropriate in loosely-coupled systems."

The technical committee is looking at whether there is any further work to be done in the area. If not, it will probably be placed into maintenance mode. There was some mention about looking at whether similar efforts from WS-CAF could be leveraged into WS-TX, but there has been no discussion in the group about this for over a year. Since WS-CAF has just closed down, this now looks unlikely.

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