Specifying and Verifying Web Transactions

New evolving internet technologies are extending the role of the World Wide Web from a platform of information exhibition to a new environment for service interactions. While new business opportunities are brought in under this new era of internet, novel challenges are coming out at the same time. Current technologies have been found lacking efficient support for web transactions. Because transactions in the context of web services have distinct features, such as autonomous and interactive, the traditional automatic mechanisms of resource locking and rollback are proved to be inappropriate. For this reason, we suggest that web transactions are constructed through a series of compensable transactions, using the concept of compensation to ensure a relatively relaxed atomicity. This paper formally expresses the composition structures and behavioral dependencies of compensable transactions. Based on the formal description for a transaction model, we are able to further verify its transactional behavior according to the specified requirement of relaxed atomicity and more precise behavioral properties with temporal constraints.

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