WS-Transaction

WS-Transaction is an interoperability standard that includes the WS-AtomicTransaction, WS-BusinessActivity, and WS-Coordination specifications. Use these topics to learn more about WS-Transaction.

The Web Services Atomic Transaction (WS-AT) support in the application server provides transactional quality of service to the web services environment. Distributed web services applications, and the resources they use, can take part in distributed global transactions. With Web Services Business Activity (WS-BA) support in the application server, web services on different systems can coordinate activities that are more loosely coupled than atomic transactions. Such activities can be difficult or impossible to roll back atomically, and therefore require a compensation process if an error occurs. Web Services Coordination (WS-COOR) specifies a CoordinationContext and a Registration service with which participant web services can enlist to take part in the protocols that are offered by specific coordination types.

To learn about WS-Transaction in WebSphere Application Server, see the following topics:

• Web Services Atomic Transaction support in the application server

• Web Services Business Activity support in the application server

• Web services transactions, high availability, firewalls and intermediary nodes

• Transaction compensation and business activity support

• WS-Transaction and mixed-version cells

Subtopics

• Web Services Atomic Transaction support in the application server
  The Web Services Atomic Transaction (WS-AT) support in the application server provides transactional quality of service to the web services environment. Distributed web services applications, and the resources they use, can take part in distributed global transactions.

• Web Services Business Activity support in the application server
  With Web Services Business Activity (WS-BA) support in the application server, web services on different systems can coordinate activities that are more loosely coupled than atomic transactions. Such activities can be difficult or impossible to roll back atomically, and therefore require a compensation process if an error occurs.

• Web services transactions, high availability, firewalls and intermediary nodes
  We can configure the system to enable propagation of Web Services Atomic Transactions (WS-AT) message contexts and Web Service Business Activities (WS-BA) message contexts across firewalls or outside the WAS domain. With these configurations, we can distribute web service applications that use WS-AT or WS-BA across disparate systems. The topology that you use can affect the high availability and affinity behavior of the transactions.

• Transaction compensation and business activity support
  A business activity is a collection of tasks that are linked together so that they have an agreed outcome. Unlike atomic transactions, activities such as sending an email can be difficult or impossible to roll back atomically, and therefore require a compensation process in the event of an error. The WebSphere Application Server business activity support provides this compensation ability through business activity scopes.

• WS-Transaction and mixed-version cells
  We must consider WS-Transaction policy type enablement and behavior, and the WS-Transaction specification level to use, when a cell contains servers at different versions; for example, WAS v7 or later and WAS v6.1 Feature Pack for Web Services.

• Business activity API
  Use the business activity (API) to create business activities and compensation handlers for an application component, and to log data required to compensate an activity if there is a failure in the overall business activity.

Related tasks

Use WS-Transaction policy to coordinate transactions or business activities for web services

WS-Transaction policy settings

Transaction service settings

Business activity API