Transactional Business Coordination and Failure Recovery for Web Services Composition

Web services have become a new wave for Internet-based business applications. Through compositions of Web services available, value-added services can be built. More and more enterprises have ventured into this area staking a claim in their future. However, there still exists a great challenge to perform transactions in the loosely coupled environment. Traditional ACID transaction model is not suitable and failure recovery algorithm ensuring semantic atomicity is needed. In this paper, we propose a process-oriented transactional business coordination model with hierarchical structure. It allows dependencies across hierarchies and supports various transactional behaviors of different services. Based on this model, a novel failure recovery algorithm is presented. It can ensure semantic atomicity for long running Web services composition. Analysis shows it can effectively reduce compensation sphere and thus decrease costs. The correctness and implementation issues of this algorithm are also presented.