Long running, consistent, web service transactions

This paper investigates the problem of providing long-running web service transactions that maintain consistency, high availability, and durability. Long running transactions involve human interaction as activities in the transaction. The human interaction increases the latency of the overall transaction. Implementation options are considered for managing limited resources held by a transaction that contain two or more web service requests separated by human interaction. In our previous work, we proposed a replica update propagation method called the Buddy System, which guaranteed consistency, durability and higher availability of web services. The previous work studied transactions composed of a single coarse-grained request. In this paper, the Buddy System is extended to allow long-running transactions comprising two or more web-service calls separated by human interaction.