Re: Cross-application transactions in middleware systems

On Tue, 27 Mar 2001 10:26:15 +0200, "Judith" <judith.retief_at_iname.com> wrote:
>When I asked a BizTalk expert the question of whether BizTalk could handle
>cross-application transactions I got a reply "there is not a single
>technology in the whole world that can support that'. This is stupefying, to
>me. What it implies is that, in spite of the unified service platform
>provided by the middleware, the client application still has to know which
>operations are handled by which servers, breaking the whole 'any service
>anywhare in any technology' model that the sollution is supposed to
>delivery.

Well, it's never easy, and Microsoft doesn't lead in middleware, and BizTalk is a concept in search of a useful first implementation.

I'd say you can construct the middleware to "know" where its partial transactions are, you can hide it from the client -- but that's you doing it, not the monitor. Distributed transactions aren't exactly impossible, but they are often prohibitively expensive in terms of middleware licenses, hardware resources, and execution time.

Posting up, down, and sideways and propagating exceptions back and forth yourself is always possible instead. Maybe it's not as pretty, but it gets the job done.

J. Received on Thu Mar 29 2001 - 03:27:08 CEST