WS-Trans­ac­tion ver­sion 1.0 is out

It took a long time to fin­ish, but at last the WS-Trans­ac­tion spec­i­fi­ca­tion is now avail­able in ver­sion 1.0!

This spec­i­fi­ca­tion con­sists of two con­crete stan­dards, WS-AtomicTrans­ac­tion and WS-Busi­nessAc­tiv­i­ty. Be­sides BTP (re­leased at OASIS a few years ago), this is the first 'of­fi­cial' re­lease of a WS stan­dard for trans­ac­tions across web ser­vices.

Un­like BTP, this one is backed by in­dus­try gi­ants, and very com­pact as well. At the very least, this gives us a like­ly can­di­date for in­dus­try-wide adop­tion.

There are still some things that I don't like -- to name one, the com­pen­sa­tion mod­el is built to suit BPEL4WS mean­ing that it has no busi­ness-lev­el ac­tions upon close of the ac­tiv­i­ty (the Atomikos com­pen­sa­tion mod­el does a lot more to fos­ter ser­vice au­ton­o­my and busi­ness-lev­el sta­tus of ac­tiv­i­ties).

But at least the atom­ic trans­ac­tion part seems ac­cept­able...