Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Hmmm, Web 2.0 features on my blog

While reading my friend Greg's response to my recent posting on transactions and SOA (really on transactions and scale), I noticed that his posts were flavoured with Web 2.0 style labels. I didn't even realise our shared blogging system had been updated to support such a thing. DO'h. Yet another feature I'll have to get used to.

Anyway, I also realised that maybe my post wasn't explicit enough with regards to transaction futures, so here goes again. I don't see distributed ACID transactions having much of a future in large scale systems. I do think that something called a transaction coordinator, with an associated transaction model has an important role to play, though the semantics such models offer to the developer will be different (and not necessarily subtly different either). If you look at some of the extended transaction models that looked at years ago they do blur the distinction between what you might class as workflow and "transactions". But there's still a reliable coordinator in there that controls the state transitions and can "do the right thing" on failure and recovery.

OK, enough of this for now. I've got to go and present.

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