PhD Case Studentship

Project Dates: From September 2002 to August 2005

Project Leader: Prof. Santosh Shrivastava

Staff: Dr. Paul Robinson

Sponsors: Hewlett Packard

Extended Transaction Models.

Although it has long been realised that ACID transactions by themselves are not adequate for structuring long-lived applications and much research work has been done on developing specific extended transaction models, ideas on what middleware support for building extended transactions is required and have been developed only recently (e.g., the COBRA Activity Service Framework).

The design of the Activity Service is based on the insight that the various extended transaction models can be supported by providing a general purpose event signalling mechanism that can be programmed to enable activities - application specific units of computations - to coordinate each other in a manner prescribed by the model under consideration. The different extended transaction models can be mapped onto specific implementations of this framework permitting such transactions to span a network of systems connected indirectly by some distribution infrastructure. A transaction model currently being proposed within the context of Web Services is BTP (business transaction protocol). It is more likely that other such models will emerge (say within the context of mobile computing).

The aim of this research will be to develop techniques and tools for implementing extended transaction models on top of a generic service such as the Activity Service.