CUSTOMIZING TRANSACTION MODELS AND MECHANISMS IN A PROGRAMMABLE ENVIRONMENT SUPPORTING RELIABLE WORKFLOW AUTOMATION

A Transaction Specification and Management Environment (TSME) is a pro grammable system that supports implementation-independent specificatio n of application-specific extended transaction models (ETMs) and confi guration of transaction management mechanisms (TMMs) to enforce specif ied ETMs. The TSME can ensure correctness and reliability while allowi ng the functionality required by workflows and other advanced applicat ions that require access to multiple heterogeneous, autonomous, and/or distributed (HAD) systems. To support ETM specification, the TSME pro vides a transaction specification language that describes dependencies between transactions. Unlike other ETM specification languages, TSME' s dependency descriptors use a common set of primitives, and are enfor ceable, i.e,, can be evaluated at any time during transaction executio n to determine whether operations issued violate ETM specifications. T o determine whether an ETM can be enforced in a specific HAD system en vironment, the TSME supports specification of the transactional capabi lities of HAD systems, and comparison of these with ETM specifications to determine mismatches. To enforce ETMs that are more restrictive th an those supported by the union of the transactional capabilities of H AD systems, the TSME provides a collection of transactional services. These services are programmable and configurable, i.e,, they accept in structions that change their behavior as required by an ETM and can be combined in specific ways to create a run-time TMM capable of enforci ng the ETM. We discuss the TSME in the context of a distributed object management system. We give ETM specification examples and describe co rresponding TMM configurations for a telecommunications application.