Re: [ws-tx] Issue 102 - WS-AT: Editorial comments

["Monica J. Martin" <Monica.Martin@Sun.COM>]

>Ian Robinson wrote: We never finished discussing this issue on the telecon so here are some email comments:
>
>First of all, we *did* start but not conclude the discussion on:
>==>       Line 24: Change “Tentative actions visible to” to “tentative actions persistent and visible to”.
>  
>
>I agree that this simply observes an inconsistency in the text but, if
>we're going to change it, I wonder if we should be generally more precise
>in this section. The AT Coordinator has no control over the persistence or
>the visibility of the Actions it coordinates through the registered
>Participants - the AT Coordinator *only* provides the application with
>atomicity. Making coordinated actions persistent and visible is the job of
>the Participants or the resource managers they delegate to. So I would like
>to suggest that we change the text at lines 19-26 from:
>
>"The actions taken prior to commit are only tentative (i.e., not persistent
>and not visible to other activities).... Commit makes the tentative actions
>visible to other transactions.  Abort makes the tentative actions appear as
>if the actions never happened."
>to:
>"The actions taken by a transaction participant prior to commit are only
>tentative (and so typically are neither made persistent nor made visible to
>other activities)...Commit directs the participants to make the tentative
>actions final so they may, for example, be persisted and made visible to
>other transactions.  Abort directs the participants to make the tentative
>actions appear as if the actions never happened."
>  
>
mm1: Ian and Ram, have you considered this is introductory, high-level text that is more focused on the user point of view rather than the implementor?   The AT Coordinator control whether all actions that participants are responsible for succeed or abort, rather than directly persist or rollback data.  If the participant is a durable one (rather than a volatile one), it could be persisting data. Or, do you believe your text is consistent with that view? Thanks.

Joe Fialli
Monica J. Martin