An approach to optimistic commit and transparent compensation for e-service transactions,” HPL-2001-34, HP Laboratories Palo Alto

distributed transaction processing, optimistic commit, transparent transaction compensation, e-services, Internet, e-commerce Web based services, also termed E-services are either stand-alone or use other web services for performing their tasks. Such E-services that depend on other E-services are termed composite e-services. The composition can be static or dynamic, i.e. either these e-services interact amongst themselves in a prenegotiated manner or dynamically discover each other and negotiate on the fly. E-service to e-services interaction takes place across enterprises and management domains. To conduct a business task, an e-service undertakes a conversation that spans across multiple eservices, which is often asynchronous and asymmetric. Within a conversation, the unit of business at each e-service is called a component transaction. The component transactions within a conversation form a conversational transaction. Each component transaction is autonomous and independent while it is related to each other only in the context of a specific conversation. A conversational transaction is committed if each component is committed. If one or more component transactions abort, its parent transaction, depending on the business logic, may abort or start one or more new component transactions. In this paper, we argue that the traditional transaction semantics and mechanisms do not apply well in the e-service world, and propose a new approach to enabling transaction support on th