The Web Services Transactions specifications define mechanisms for transactional interoperability between Web services domains and provide a means to compose transactional qualities of service into Web services applications.

The Web Services Transactions specifications describe an extensible coordination framework (WS-Coordination) and specific coordination types for:

• Short duration, ACID transactions (WS-AtomicTransaction)
• Longer running business transactions (WS-BusinessActivity)

WS-Coordination

This specification describes an extensible framework for providing protocols that coordinate the actions of distributed applications. Such coordination protocols are used to support a number of applications, including those that need to reach consistent agreement on the outcome of distributed activities.

The framework defined in this specification enables an application service to create a context needed to propagate an activity to other services and to register for coordination protocols. The framework enables existing transaction processing, workflow, and other systems for coordination to hide their proprietary protocols and to operate in a heterogeneous environment.

Additionally this specification describes a definition of the structure of context and the requirements for propagating context between cooperating services.

WS-AtomicTransaction

This specification provides the definition of the atomic transaction coordination type that is to be used with the extensible coordination framework described in the WS-Coordination specification. The specification defines three specific agreement coordination protocols for the atomic transaction coordination type: completion, volatile two-phase commit, and durable two-phase commit. Developers can use any or all of these protocols when building applications that require consistent agreement on the outcome of short-lived distributed activities that have the all-or-nothing property.

WS-BusinessActivity

This specification provides the definition of the business activity coordination type that is to be used with the extensible coordination framework described in the WS-Coordination specification. The specification defines two specific agreement coordination protocols for the business activity coordination type: BusinessAgreementWithParticipantCompletion and BusinessAgreementWithCoordinatorCompletion. Developers can use any or all of these protocols when building applications that require consistent agreement on the outcome of long-running distributed activities.

Get the specifications

You can still view the previous versions of these specifications by clicking on the following links:

WS-Coordination specification previous versions: September 2003, PDF | November 2004, PDF
WS-AtomicTransaction specification previous versions: September 2003, PDF | November 2004, PDF
WS-BusinessActivity specification previous versions: January 2004, PDF | November 2004, PDF

Resources

• "Transactions in a Web services World," Part 1 and Part 2 describe how the model defined in these specifications works (developerWorks, August 2002).
  
  
• "A comparison of Web services transaction protocols" compares how different transaction protocols may be applied to solve specific business problems (developerWorks, October 2003).
  
  
• Explore how transactions work in one common and classic form to preserve data integrity, and apply that classical transaction description to the operations of the Web Services Atomic Transactions (WS-AT) and Web Services Coordination (WS-C) specifications in the article "Tour Web Services Atomic Transaction operations" (developerWorks, September 2004).
  
  
• WS-Policy and WS-PolicyAssertions may affect how business activities operate.
  
  
• Business activities can utilize the secure messaging features of WS-Security.
  
  
• The joint whitepaper "Federation in a Web services world" describes the issues around federated identity management and a comprehensive solution based on the Web services model as outlined in the WS-Security roadmap (developerWorks, July 2003).
  
  
• "Security in a Web services world" describes a proposed strategy for addressing security within a Web service environment (Joint whitepaper, developerWorks, April 2002).
  
  

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