Six into two should go!

Choreology’s Peter Furniss and Bob Haugen presented this "critical comparison of Web service business transaction specifications" at the OASIS Reliable Infrastructures for XML Symposium on 25 April 2004 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.

The subtitle of the presentation is "Six into one can go...six into two should go." That is, the six competing specifications (BTP, WS-CAF-TXM-ACID, WS-CAF-TXM-LRA, WS-CAF-TXM-BP, WS-AT and WS-BA) are all versions of the same underlying two-phase outcome protocol, and should be converged into no more than two. And for loosely-coupled Web services, they should be converged into one.

Along with the critical comparison, the presentation explains the costs of spec proliferation, the technical and political potential for convergence, why compensation is not always the best way to go, and what is often a better pattern. (See our related BTM standards pages).

The presentation concludes with some business transaction patterns and advice for implementors.

Note that while technically accurate, our earlier statement on the need for standards convergence is excessively purist. On reflection, and in the light of industry debate, we accept that there is a market justification for a “Web Services respray” specification for distributed atomic transactions, such as WS-AT, given existing vendor investment in non-Web Services distribution protocols such as CORBA OTS and MS DTC.