[query on RESTful WS] distributed transactions

Congrats to Leonard R and Sam R on the new book. An excellent subject...

Looking at the ToC, I'm intrigued by Chapter 10, which compares REST to the WS-* technology stack (Security, Reliable Messaging, etc).

I'm especially interested in distributed transactions over the web. I have not yet used WS-Transactions but have the following newbie questions:

(a) can a ROA solution work _within_ a WS-Transaction framework? Or does WS-* pretty much imply using the "big WS" stuff (SOAP, WSDL, etc).

(b) are there other frameworks available in the REST community that provide support for distributed transactions?

I think an excellent answer is "buy the book!" but I was wondering about (1) does the book address this and (2) can you give us a teaser/hint.

thanks,
Mike

WS-Transaction, as currently spec'ed, is based on SOAP. There is nothing preventing a similar facility being designed with HTTP headers in mind, but that work hasn't been done yet.

It is also worth noting tht WS-Transaction comes in two flavors: tightly coupled (Atomic) and loosely coupled (Business Activity). Much of the focus in the WS-* world is on the tightly coupled version.

M Easter,

To elaborate on what Sam said: in chapter 8 we give a RESTful system
for non-distributed transactions. I haven't done the work (I suspect
nobody has) but if you have a number of different systems that support
transactions, you should be able to add some infrastructure on top and
orchestrate them with a RESTful atomic transaction.

We didn't cover atomic transactions in detail because Sam prefers the
loosely coupled transactions of WS-BusinessActivity. In chapter 10,
probably in the ToC section you found interesting ("Transactions"), we
show how to implement the WS-BusinessActivity ideas with asynchronous
operations (which, in turn, are covered in chapter 8).