Web ser­vice trans­ac­tions

So what's the best way to do trans­ac­tions that span mul­ti­ple ser­vices?

We used to sup­port 'heavy' web ser­vice trans­ac­tion stan­dards like WS-Trans­ac­tions. It was a mis­take. A huge one, for that mat­ter. Here is why:

• It's over­ly com­plex: to think that dif­fer­ent ven­dors' SOAP in­ter­cep­tors can seam­less­ly in­ter­op­er­ate is wish­ful think­ing. It just doesn't work that way.
• It's a dis­as­ter in terms of per­for­mance: it takes about 8 or 9 roundtrips (!) to com­mit just one trans­ac­tion. Per­for­mance, any­one?
• It's a de­sign-by-com­mit­tee thing, mean­ing it makes for a com­pro­mise be­tween ven­dor of­fer­ings rather than a best-of-breed so­lu­tion.

So if you want trans­ac­tions across (web) ser­vices then what do you do? There are a few op­tions:

• Use BASE when­ev­er pos­si­ble: pub­lish sig­nif­i­cant events to a JMS bus in a re­li­able way with ACID trans­ac­tions - avail­able in any of our prod­ucts.
• For REST-based reser­va­tion process­es, use our Trans­ac­tions for SOA ap­proach be­cause it is pure, sim­ple and com­pli­ant with pure REST.
• For REST-based mi­croser­vices: see Trans­ac­tion­al REST mi­croser­vices with Atomikos

So what do you think: what is your favourite ap­proach? If you think we missed one, feel free to com­ment