From Session Guarantees to Contract Guarantees for Consistency of SOA-Compliant Processing

Reliability of service-oriented distributed processing is gaining constantly growing attention. Some attempts to apply well-known fault tolerance techniques have been investigating interaction compensation, service replication or rollback-recovery, among others. For instance, the rollback-recovery approach promises to fully mask the occurrence of faults, allowing the critical or long-running applications (business processes) to automatically restore the consistent processing state. Unfortunately, the notion of consistent state is very ambiguous and has not been formalized in the context of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). In this paper we demonstrate how former approaches to specify consistency requirements for distributed shared memory can be adapted to the SOA environment.