Towards Distributed Atomic Transactions over RESTful Services

Abstract

There is considerable debate in the {REST} community whether or not transaction support is needed and possible. This chapter’s contribution to this debate is threefold: we define a business case for transactions in {REST} based on the Try-{Cancel/Confirm} ({TCC)} pattern; we outline a very light-weight protocol that guarantees atomicity and recovery over distributed {REST} resources; and we discuss the inherent theoretical limitations of our approach. Our {TCC} for {REST} approach minimizes the assumptions made on the individual services that can be part of a transaction and does not require any extension to the {HTTP} protocol. A very simple but realistic example helps to illustrate the applicability of the approach.