A survey of transactional issues for Web Service composition and recovery

This paper presents a survey of relevant transactional and recovery issues for the development of processes that are composed of web services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). A process in an SOA is not a traditional ACID transaction due to the loosely-coupled, autonomous, and heterogeneous nature of the execution environment. As a result, processes that are composed of web services can pose challenges for data consistency in the context of concurrent processes that are accessing shared data. This paper first outlines past research on advanced transaction models and transactional workflows that has established the framework for coordination and recovery techniques associated with web service composition. The standards that have evolved to support web service composition and a coordinated commit process among web services are then presented. The paper then elaborates on research projects that address data consistency issues for web service composition, outlining relaxed locking techniques, data dependency analysis techniques, and other modularization techniques for addressing user-defined correctness, flexible recovery actions, and cross-cutting concerns. Failure recovery strategies for Web Services are also addressed, describing how current research builds on the foundation provided by advanced transaction models to perform recovery for processes composed of Web Services. The overview of failure recovery strategies also includes self-healing mechanisms and Copyright c © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. 2 Le Gao and Susan D. Urban checkpointing systems for service execution. The paper concludes by outlining challenges for future research on web service composition and recovery.