Coordinating activities through extended sagas: a summary

The authors describe an environment designed to support activities such as a purchase order. They propose a simple set of services which would be useful for describing and executing activities. In an implementation, an underlying system would provide these services for activities, much as an operating system provides a set of services for processes. The environment consists of a system call interface (Create, Bind, Commit, Abort, CompensationBind, Send, Receive) which programs can use to request services. These services are designed to support some of the important requirements of data processing activities, including concurrency, modularity, fault tolerance, rollback, and communication.<>