Re: [werkflow-user] Business Transaction Management

"Mark H. Wilkinson" <[email protected]> Fri, 10 Oct 2003 09:02:19 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.comp.java.werkflow
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Fri, 2003-10-10 at 04:09, [email protected] wrote:
> 
> A quick question before I dig deeper: are you guys planning to (or
> already did) implement some sort of generic business transaction
> management?

It's certainly something that I'd like to have in there, but werkflow
doesn't do it at the moment. I'm expecting transaction management to
become more important in the next year or two, so I'd be interested in
working on it.

> By business transaction management, I mean a solution that allows for
> managing non-ACID long-running transactions  (example of protocol: the
> WS-Transactions). That would encompass -- for example -- generating
> compensatory transaction requests to the workflow-integrated
> applications automatically and in a generic fashion (rather than
> generating compensatory transactions in an ad-hoc fashion by an
> exception path in the workflow). 

Hmm; interesting. I'd always thought of the compensatory actions being
things that needed to be manually built (in an exception path as you
describe). Under what circumstances is it possible to automatically
generate the compensating actions? Are you thinking of distributed
rollback across participants in a two-phase commit protocol, or across
more long lived transactions? What about non-transactional participants?
I've read around the web-services transactioning space but don't know
what's possible when you get down to details.

-Mark.