Reliable transactions in web services environment
The emergence and diffusion of web services and other distributed technologies is creating a unique opportunity for providing value added, inter-organisational services to businesses and individual customers. Organisations, on the other hand, need to ensure that these services are available, scalable and also autonomic to guarantee that user interactions are promptly processed even under highly volatile conditions. The European ADAPT project endeavoured to provide open-source middleware support for the creation of dynamically adaptive and composable web services. The project dealt essentially with the introduction of mechanisms for increased adaptability and clustering of application servers to support the creation of adaptive basic web services (BSs). The ADAPT framework for composing multiple BSs into new Composite Services (CSs) includes the necessary software infrastructure for flexible linking and moreover, monitoring of intra- and inter-enterprise business processes. The release of Web Services Transactions (WS-TX) and Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) specifications provided a much needed standardised approach to context propagation, coordination and transaction management. Arjuna Technologies Ltd. developed an industrial-strength web services implementation, supporting both specifications that demonstrated interoperability with other industrial leaders, such as IBM and Microsoft. Arjuna added powerful distributed transaction processing capabilities to a widely deployed transaction engine, which will appeal to enterprises in sectors such as financial services and telecommunications. In partnership with their collaborators, Arjuna will continue driving growth in the open source community and expand the reach of open source by making high-end distributed transaction processing technology readily available.
