Chapter 17. Transactions Overview

Every transaction is associated with a coordinator, which is responsible for governing the outcome of the transaction. When a client begins a Web Service transaction it posts a create request to a coordination service, which creates the coordinator and returns its details to the client. This service may be located in its own container or may be colocated with the application client or with one of the transactional web services for improved performance. The coordination service is typically responsible for managing many transactions in parallel, so each coordinator is identified by a unique transaction identifier.

The coordinator is responsible for ensuring that the web services invoked by the client arrive at a consistent outcome. When the client asks the coordinator to complete the transaction, the coordinator ensures that each web service is ready to confirm any provisional changes it has made within the scope of the transaction. It then asks them all to make their changes permanent. If any of the web services indicates a problem at the confirmation stage, the coordinator ensures that all web services reject their provisional changes, reverting to the state before the transaction started. The coordinator also reverts all changes if the client asks it to cancel the transaction.

The negotiation between the coordinator and the web services is organized to ensure that all services will make their changes permanent, or all of them will revert to the previous state, even if the coordinator or one of the web services crashes part of the way through the transaction."