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Lookup NU author(s): Emeritus Professor Santosh Shrivastava, Professor Mark Little
Business-to-business integration (B2Bi) solutions offered by vendors fall into two broad categories: hub-and-spoke (interaction between partners takes place through a central hub that acts as an intermediary), and peer-to-peer (interaction takes place directly between partners). Vendors are increasingly offering cloud based solutions; a hub-and-spoke architecture is well suited to SaaS level provision whereas a peer-to-peer architecture offers a wider set of options, allowing individual partners to deploy their side of software at the level of IaaS, PaaS or SaaS. An important coordination problem in B2Bi that needs addressing is how to ensure that business interactions between partners terminate in a consistent manner even in the presence of application level exceptions and software, hardware and network related problems commonly encountered in distributed systems. Solutions that have been developed so far and incorporated in SOA middleware are essentially based on OASIS WS-TX set of transaction standards, namely WS-coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity. WS-TX based solutions require a central activity coordinator. The paper argues that although these solutions are quite suitable within a hub- and spoke B2Bi architecture, they sit awkwardly in peer-to-peer B2Bi settings, where a distributed approach, not requiring a central coordinator is more suitable. The paper develops such an approach; it focuses on the choreography of the business function and describes how to make the choreography atomic, ensuring consistent termination in the presence of application level exceptions and failures.
Author(s): Shrivastava S, Little M
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: School of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 2015
Pages: 12
Print publication date: 01/03/2015
Report Number: 1457
Institution: School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/1457.pdf
