This paper develops some control structures suitable for composing fault-tolerant distributed applications using atomic actions (atomic transactions) as building blocks, and then goes on to describe how such structures may be implemented using the concept of multicoloured actions. We first identify the reasons why other control structures in addition to - by now well known - nested and concurrent atomic actions are desirable and then propose three new structures: serializing actions, glued actions and top-level independent actions. A number of examples are used to illustrate their usefulness. A novel technique, based on the concept of multi- coloured actions, is then presented as a uniform basis for implementing all of the three action structures presented here
