On 07/21/2010 10:53 AM, Anto wrote:
Just curious, why no paying customers are not demanding it? Is it that there are other ways to implement transactions other than WS-* specs? Or is it not a practical solution for transaction management?
JBoss has had an XTS implementation for quite a few years but it has only been included in a supported product since early this year. Even so we have clients who have used it in deployments from before it was supported. IBM have also has a web service transactions implementation based on WS-* for at least as long as JBoss and they have clients who use it.
Part of the problem is that the WS spec leaves the web service programmer to iplement the transactional lifecycle events such as prepare, rollback, complete, compensate etc. This is not something a lot of web programmers know how to do well. I suspect that has made take-up of XTS rather slow.
One of the things we have investigated at JBoss in order to make this simpler is transaction bridging i.e. automatically enlisting a WS-AT web service in a subordinate JTA transaction. This allows the web service implementor to just use XA data sources for managing web service data and rely on it to handle the prepare/rollback of data. This is planned for inclusion as a supported component in JBoss EAP 6 (EAP is our product AS) but it is working with full recovery support in EAP 5 and you can use it for free in the community AS 5/6 release.
We have also looked at ways of making it easier to implement WS-BA clients. We presented a transaction framweork at JavaOne in 2008 which provided automation support for handling compensation actions in WS-BA web services which might be worth looking up.
regards, Andrew Dinn -----------
