Towards an Enhanced Protocol for Improving Transactional Support in Interoperable Service Oriented Application-Based (SOA-Based) Systems

When using a shared database for distributed transactions, it is often difficult to connect business processes and software components running on disparate platforms into a single transaction. For instance, one platform may add or update data, and then another platform later access the changed or added data. This severely limits transactional capabilities across platforms. This situation becomes more acute when concurrent transactions with interleaving operations spans across different applications and resources. Addressing this problem in an open, dynamic and distributed environment of web services poses special challenges, and still remains an open issue. Following the broad adoption and use of the standard Web Services Transaction Protocols, requirements have grown for the addition of extended protocols to handle problems that exist within the context of interoperable service-oriented applications. Most extensions to the current standard WS-Transaction Protocols still lack proper mechanisms for error-handling, concurrency control, transaction recovery, consolidation of multiple transaction calls into a single call, and secure reporting and tracing for suspicious activities. In this research, we will first extend the current standard WS-Transaction Framework, and then propose an enhanced protocol (that can be deployed within the extended framework) to improve transactional and security support for asynchronous applications in a distributed environment. A hybrid methodology which incorporates service-oriented engineering and rapid application development will be used to develop a procurement system (which represents an interoperable service-oriented application) that integrates our proposed protocol. We will empiricall