Architectural Decisions and Patterns for Transactional Workflows in SOA

  • Authors:
  • Olaf Zimmermann;Jonas Grundler;Stefan Tai;Frank Leymann

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, Säumerstrasse 4, 8803 Rüschlikon, Switzerland;IBM Software Group, Schönaicher Strasse 220, 71032 Böblingen, Germany;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532, USA;Universität Stuttgart, IAAS, Universitätsstraße 38, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany

  • Venue:
  • ICSOC '07 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Service-Oriented Computing
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

An important architectural style for constructing enterprise appli ca ti ons is to use transactional workflows in SOA. In this setting, workflow ac ti vi ties invoke distributed services in a co or di nated manner, using transaction con text-pro pa ga ting messages, coordi na tion pro to cols, and compensation logic. De signing such trans actional workflows is a time-con su ming and error-prone task re quiring deep subject matter exper tise. Aiming to alleviate this prob lem, we in tro duce a new analysis and design method that (a) identifies recurring ar chi tec tural de ci si ons in analysis-level process models, (b) models alter na tives for these decisions as reusable, plat form-independent pat terns and pri mitives, and (c) maps the pat terns and pri mi tives into technology- and plat form-specific set tings in BPEL and SCA. Our method accelerates the identification of decisions, empowers pro cess modelers to make informed de ci sions, and au to ma tes the enforcement of the decisions in de ployment artifacts; tool support is available. We de mon strate value and fea si bi li ty of our method in an industry case study.