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2.10. A New Transaction Protocol

Many component technologies offer mechanisms for coordinating ACID transactions based on two-phase commit semantics. Some of these are CORBA/OTS, JTS/JTA, and MTS/MSDTC. ACID transactions are not suitable for all Web Services transactions, as explained in Reasons ACID is Not Suitable for Web Services.
Reasons ACID is Not Suitable for Web Services

2.10.1. Addressing the Problems of Transactioning in Loosely Coupled Systems

Though extended transaction models which relax the ACID properties have been proposed over the years, standards such as OASIS WS-TX provide a new transaction protocol to implement these concepts for the Web services architecture. The are designed to accommodate four underlying requirements inherent in any loosely coupled architecture like Web services:.
Requirements of Web Services
  • Ability to handle multiple successful outcomes to a transaction, and to involve operations whose effects may not be isolated or durable.
  • Coordination of autonomous parties whose relationships are governed by contracts, rather than the dictates of a central design authority.
  • Discontinuous service, where parties are expected to suffer outages during their lifetimes, and coordinated work must be able to survive such outages.
  • Interoperation using XML over multiple communication protocols. XTS uses SOAP encoding carried over HTTP.