Seven challenges for RESTful transaction models

The REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architectural style describes the design principles that made the World Wide Web scalable and the same principles can be applied in enterprise context to do loosely coupled and scalable application integration. In recent years, RESTful services are gaining traction in the industry and are commonly used as a simpler alternative to SOAP Web Services. However, one of the main drawbacks of RESTful services is the lack of standard mechanisms to support advanced quality-ofservice requirements that are common to enterprises. Transaction processing is one of the essential features of enterprise information systems and several transaction models have been proposed in the past years to fulfill the gap of transaction processing in RESTful services. The goal of this paper is to analyze the state-of-the-art RESTful transaction models and identify the current challenges

Atomic Distributed Transactions: a RESTful Design

ABSTRACT The REST architectural style supports the reliable interaction of clients with a single server. However, no guarantees can be made for more complex interactions which require to atomically transfer state among resources distributed across multiple servers. In this paper we describe a lightweight design for transactional composition of RESTful services. The approach -based on the TryCancel/Confirm (TCC) pattern -does not require any extension to the HTTP protocol. The design assumes that resources are designed to comply with the TCC pattern and ensures that the resources involved in the transaction are not aware of it. It delegates the responsability of achieving the atomicity of the transaction to a coordinator which exposes a RESTful API