[business-transaction] BTP Vs WS-xxx

[Krishna Sankar <ksankar@cisco.com>]

Hi all,

    Here are some comments from Ricky Ho. I am sure some of you have met
him. He has a lot of good insights. Would like to hear your thoughts.

Cheers

I've observed some differences between the BTP model and the
WS-Transaction/Co-ordination.  While I think  BTP is more sophisticated.
WS-transaction has taken out some powerful features (maybe they want to
make thing simpler).  Can you give me some feedback ?

1a)  In BTP, the transaction termination protocol is based on a 2-phase
interactions and pretty much the same for both atomic transaction and
business transaction.

1b)  In WS-Transaction, the transaction termination protocol are
significantly different between "atomic transaction" and "business
activity".  While terminating an atomic transaction is similar to BTP,
terminating a business activity is NOT based on a 2-phase interaction
protocol at all.

2a) BTP allows the participant application to make its commitment either
when it is invoked, or at a later stage when it is explicitly asked for
"prepare".

2b) In "business activity", WS-Transaction requires the participant
application to make its commitment when it is invoked.  So that the
"prepare" phase of transaction termination is not required.

3a) BTP has the concept of "COHESION" which allows the initiator to
select a final subset of participants to commit.

3b) WS-Transaction doesn't seem to have the "COHESION" concept.

4a) BTP has the concept of "conditional commitment" by letting the
participant application to associate a timeout value in the "prepared"
response.

4b) WS-Transaction doesn't seem to have the "conditional commitment"
concept.

Comments ??

Rgds, Ricky