Although it has long been realised that ACID transactions by themselves are not adequate for structuring long-lived applications and much research work has been done on developing specific extended transaction models, no middleware support for building extended transactions is currently available and the situation remains that a programmer often has to develop application specific mechanisms. The CORBA Activity Service Framework described in this paper is a way out of this situation. The design of the service is based on the insight that the various extended transaction models can be supported by providing a general purpose event signalling mechanism that can be programmed to enable activities - application specific units of computations – to coordinate each other in a manner prescribed by the model under consideration. The different extended transaction models can be mapped onto specific implementations of this framework permitting such transactions to span a network of systems con...
Iain Houston, Mark C. Little, Ian Robinson, Santos