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Towards Distributed Atomic Transactions over RESTful Services

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REST: From Research to Practice

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Especially because the participants are not aware that they are part of a transaction

  2. 2.

    A similar idea (but lacking the “try” phase) was also proposed in the OASIS BTP proposal (Dalal et al. 2003), which was standardized but remains without any current implementations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ATOMIKOS, Hoveniersstraat 39/1, 2800, Mechelen, Belgium

    Guy Pardon

  2. Faculty of Informatics, University of Lugano, via Buffi 13, 6900, Lugano, Switzerland

    Cesare Pautasso

Authors
  1. Guy Pardon
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  2. Cesare Pautasso
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Guy Pardon .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. , School of Information, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, 97420, USA

    Erik Wilde

  2. , Faculty of Informatics, University of Lugano, Via Buffi 13, Lugano, 6900, Switzerland

    Cesare Pautasso

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Pardon, G., Pautasso, C. (2011). Towards Distributed Atomic Transactions over RESTful Services. In: Wilde, E., Pautasso, C. (eds) REST: From Research to Practice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8303-9_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8303-9_23

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-8302-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-8303-9

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