Towards Distributed Atomic Transactions over RESTful Services

TitleTowards Distributed Atomic Transactions over RESTful Services
Publication TypeBook Chapter
Year of Publication2011
AuthorsPardon, G., and C. Pautasso
Book TitleREST: From Research to Practice
Pages507-524
PublisherSpringer
Keywordsatomic transactions, REST, RESTful Web service interface, try-confirm-cancel
Abstract

There is considerable debate in the REST community whether or not transaction support is needed and possible. This chapter’s contribution to this debate is threefold: we define a business case for transactions in REST based on the Try-Cancel/Confirm (TCC) pattern; we outline a very light-weight protocol that guarantees atomicity and recovery over distributed REST resources; and we discuss the inherent theoretical limitations of our approach. Our TCC for REST approach minimizes the assumptions made on the individual services that can be part of a transaction and does not require any extension to the HTTP protocol. A very simple but realistic example helps to illustrate the applicability of the approach.

DOI10.1007/978-1-4419-8303-9_23
Citation KeyDBLP:books/sp/wilde2011/PardonP11
Refereed DesignationRefereed