A Comparison of WS-BusinessActivity and BPEL4WS Long-Running Transaction

Although WS-BusinessActivity and BPEL4WS Long-Running Transaction (LRT) are conceptually very similar and are both designed to support the execution of complex business transactions, they differ in a large number of aspects. This is particularly true because BPEL4WS, unlike WSBusinessActivity, was not designed to support distributed coordination. This paper comprehensively discusses the similarities and differences between WSBusinessActivity and BPEL4WS LRT and demonstrates the two concepts on the basis of a joint example. The proposal is to replace BPEL4WS' concept of compensation handlers with a more comprehensive handler type – coordination handlers – that communicate only via SOAP messages and thus make WSBusinessActivity redundant.