Commercial Products

There are a number of vendors that provide solutions in the transaction interoperability space.

• Arjuna Technologies implements the WS-Transaction specification into the Arjuna XML Transaction Service. This solution is based on the JAXTX API discussed as part of JSR 156 and provides a reliable coordination infrastructure to support distributed transactions that span across multiple Web services.

• Atomikos provides support for the WS-Transaction standard with its product "Transactions," and is committed to adding any other future transaction standards, should the need arise. On the (Java EE) server side, Atomikos also offers the possibility to plug-in custom application logic for the global commit and/or rollback events of a Web service transaction (the so-called compensating transaction handler pattern). In addition, Atomikos Transactions offer bridging between different transaction protocolsfor instance, a SOAP message can be received with a WS-T transaction context, and this transaction can then be transparently exported over RMI/IIOP with any remote RMI call made during the processing of the message.

• Choreology is another player in this space that provides implementation to the Business Transaction Protocol, among other standards.

• IBM released the Web Services Atomic Transaction for the WebSphere Application Server 5.0.2 Technical Preview (WSAT) distribution. This technical preview is the initial step toward building a distributed transaction support into the WebSphere application server.

• Microsoft also plans to integrate support for Web services transactions into the .NET platform.

Once industry players come within reach of transactional interoperability, achieving seamless integration across different vendors will become much simpler. In addition to the Web services-based transactional support, it is important to note that commercial vendors that provide the .NET Remoting implementation in Java also offer support for distributed transactions. For example, the JNBridgePro solution allows transaction propagation across Java EE and .NET.