Architectural decisions and patterns for transactional workflows in SOA

Abstract

An important architectural style for constructing enterprise applications is to use transactional workflows in SOA. In this setting, workflow activities invoke distributed services in a coordinated manner, using transaction context-propagating messages, coordination protocols, and compensation logic. Designing such transactional workflows is a time-consuming and error-prone task requiring deep subject matter expertise. Aiming to alleviate this problem, we introduce a new analysis and design method that (a) identifies recurring architectural decisions in analysis-level process models, (b) models alternatives for these decisions as reusable, platform-independent patterns and primitives, and (c) maps the patterns and primitives into technology- and platform-specific settings in BPEL and SCA. Our method accelerates the identification of decisions, empowers process modelers to make informed decisions, and automates the enforcement of the decisions in deployment artifacts; tool support is available. We demonstrate value and feasibility of our method in an industry case study. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.