BPMN modelling of services with dynamically reconfigurable transactions

Abstract

We promote the use of transactional attributes for modelling business processes in service-oriented scenarios. Transactional attributes have been introduced in Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) to decorate the methods published in Java containers. Attributes describe "modalities" that discipline the reconfiguration of transactional scopes (i.e., of caller and callee) upon method invocation. We define and study modelling and programming mechanisms to control dynamically reconfigurable transactional scopes in Service-Oriented Computing (SOC). On the one hand, we give evidence of the suitability of transactional attributes for modelling and programming SOC transactions. As a proof of concept, we show how BPMN can be enriched with a few annotations for transactional attributes. On the other hand, we show how the results of a theoretical framework enable us to make more effective the development of transactional service-oriented applications. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.