Cross-application transactions in middleware systems

I'm a bit of a newby in the middleware sollutions field and have a question on transactioning in such an environment. If a more relevant group than comp.databases.theory exists, my apologies - I would appreciate a pointer to such a group.

Middleware solutions such as BizTalk and mirriads of others promise to make available a single platform for the publication of third party services to client applications. Often these systems encorporate transactioning.

What I would like to know is how these systems handle transactions. Transactions of which all the operations are executed within a particular server is ok, because the server iteself implements the resource locking, rollback, committing etc. But what about when the operations are to be executed by different servers? Then the middleware has to take responsibility for all the classical transactioning issues of resource locking etc. But that can only happen if the servers expose their internal algorithms for handling these issues, which they usually don't (as far as I know).

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. Received on Tue Mar 27 2001 - 10:26:15 CEST