Guy,
Thanks for notifying us all of this
patent. I found it a very useful summary of loosely-coupled transactional
issues.
I have to say that I question the novelty
of the claimed “invention”, which seems (at a very hasty first
reading) to boil down to interposition (transaction bridging) plus a global
transaction id.
I believe that the following publications,
products or standards very likely incorporate the key features of this
“invention” and are prior art:
CCR
OSI/TP
OMG OTS
Transarc Encina
I suspect the Arjuna
research project dating back to the late eighties may also incorporate features
of relevance to the claim of invention. Mark would be better qualifed to comment than I.
I also believe that the innards of many
transactional products, and the utilization patterns of databases to achieve
high concurrency through application locking which are employed by thousands of
end-users, will also betray many similar key features.
The cluster of problems that make
application- (service-) level coordination difficult today for the assemblers of
business processes which utilize interacting systems includes many issues which
are just practical (integration with heterogeneous environments, usability
etc). Much of the novelty of Business Transaction Management (app-level
coordination) is context-conceptual.
One aspect is getting over the equation of
first use with all possible future uses.
For example: How can a protocol which is
associated with ACID possibly possess an interface that is capable of being
used for compensations? Of course, the XA control structure can be so used. Then,
treat XA function names as message names and you have a distributed
“interface” with the same capability … and so on, through all
the permutations of two-phase. XAResource used for
JCA is a useful case.
The second aspect is failure to abstract
sufficiently.
People often confuse the form or the specific
context with the essence. The difficulties that the proponents of WS-T and
WS-TXM have with the notion that all the proposed interoperable outcome
protocols (BTP, WS-T BA, WS-T AT, WS-TXM Acid, LRA and BP) are in fact versions
of one underlying “Ur” protocol (optimizable
two-phase outcome with qualifiers), in my view has its root in this type of
failure. (Parenthetically, there is every reason to have contractual [or
contract-referring] information exchanged in contexts attached to application exchanges:
but that need does not transit to the coordination protocol).
Concretely, the biggest conceptual problem
(and advance) of BTM standardization, is seeing compensation as one, special case
of negative finalization of a high-level business transaction, coupled with the
need to always have a positive finalizer (which in
that one, special case will “just”
drop its persistent memory of the business transaction). Put another way: there
is a higher-level abstraction (business transaction), which stands clear above
the database transactions which are now driven by the business transaction.
Alastair Green
CTO
Choreology Ltd
Choreology Cohesions -- Business
Transaction Management software for application coordination
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Little
[mailto:]
Sent: 11 December 2003 03:25
To: Newcomer, Eric; Guy Pardon;
Greg Pavlik
Cc: Robin Cover;
;
Subject: Re: [ws-caf] Patent
Issue(s)
Apologies for any backlog of email
responses, but I've been flying to XML 2003 today. Just to second Greg's email
- LRA is based on Sagas and similar to Open Nested transactions.
Mark.
----
Mark Little,
Chief Architect, Transactions,
Arjuna Technologies Ltd.
www.arjuna.com
----- Original Message -----
From: Newcomer, Eric
To: Guy Pardon ; Greg Pavlik
Cc: Mark Little
; Robin Cover ;
;
Sent: Wednesday,
December 10, 2003 7:58 PM
Subject: RE:
[ws-caf] Patent Issue(s)
On the
surface, it does not seem to confict since it requires a
specific implementation of Java classes and operations that create the
transaction system, whereas the WS-CAF approach is to wrap or abstract the
transaction systems (i.e. not to create one).
-----Original Message-----
From: Guy Pardon
[mailto:]
Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2003
1:32 PM
To: Greg Pavlik
Cc: Mark Little; Robin Cover;
Newcomer, Eric; ;
Subject: Re: [ws-caf] Patent
Issue(s)
Hi,
FYI, here is the patent application's description:
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=pardon.IN.&OS=IN/pardon&RS=IN/pardon
Guy
On woensdag, dec 10, 2003, at 15:07 Europe/Brussels,
Greg Pavlik wrote:
Well, the LRA model as I read it seems to
be a relatively close mapping of sagas, which were as far as I know first
described in 1987 by Garcia-Molina. I think it would be useful if someone took
the action to provide a more detailed breakdown of what exactly is at issue for
the group, because it's not obvious to me after a cursory review of the CheeTah
papers.
Guy Pardon wrote:
Hi everyone,
The VLDB paper is attached. It describes
composite systems in the CheeTah prototype (which served as the provisional
application for the US patent).
Concerning WS-CAF, I think there may be
some overlapping with the LRA model described in the TXM spec.
It was not my intention to raise panic and
'warn' anybody, rather just to point out that the patent exists (which is, I
believe, required on behalf of TC members).
Best,
Guy
On dinsdag, dec 9, 2003, at 20:27
Europe/Brussels, Mark Little wrote:
Robin, thanks. I think a description from Guy
about how he thinks any patent
relevant to this paper may conflict with
WS-CAF is in order though. Many
companies have been doing composite
applications/transactions for years so
I'd like to know what aspect of CheeTah
may either impact WS-CAF now or in
the future. This is certainly the first
I've heard of CheeTah so from an
Arjuna perspective it certainly didn't
influence WS-CAF, but maybe Guy's
email is intended to just warn the TC in
its future directions?
Mark.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Cover"
<>
To: "Newcomer, Eric"
<>
Cc: "Guy Pardon"
<>; <>
Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 7:08 PM
Subject: RE: [ws-caf] Patent Issue(s)
Perhaps:
CheeTah: a Lightweight Transaction Server
for
Plug-and-Play Internet Data Management
-------------------------------------------
Guy Pardon, Gustavo Alonso.
-------------------------------------------
Abstract:
The ability to maintain transactional
interaction
in a distributed system has proven to be a
key feature
in information systems. Unfortunately, as
technology moves
towards more distribution and
decentralization, it becomes
increasingly difficult to use existing
transactional
tools. In fact, current solutions are
entirely unsuitable
for what we call composite systems.
Composite systems
can be characterized as a collection of
distributed,
autonomous components, linked in an
arbitrary configuration.
In this paper, we describe CheeTah, a Java
based set of
tools for building composite components
capable of
interacting transactionally in arbitrary,
dynamically
changing configurations. We describe the
technology provided,
how designers would use it to build
composite transactional
systems, and examine in detail the
performance of the
resulting solution. Among the results we
have achieved,
the performance and the simplicity of use
are of particular
interest.
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/department/IS/iks/publications/pa2000.html
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/department/IS/iks/publications/files/pa2000.pdf
-----------------------------------------------------
Robin Cover
XML Cover Pages
WWW: http://xml.coverpages.org
Newsletter: http://xml.coverpages.org/newsletter.html
On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Newcomer, Eric wrote:
Guy,
To second Mark's email, can you please
also send additional information
about the patent, such as the VLDB paper
you mention.
Thanks,
Eric
-----Original Message-----
From: Guy Pardon [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 9:53 AM
To:
Subject: [ws-caf] Patent Issue(s)
Hi all,
As a TC member it is my duty to report
that there exists a US patent (US
patent application 09/682,969 -- finally approved
about two months ago)
concerning composite systems and an
additional European application being in
process. This patent is probably relevant
to the CAF specs (and most likely
to BTP as well).
Basically, the patent is an extension of
the Composite Systems VLDB
paper we (Gustavo Alonso and I) had at
VLDB2000.
Best,
Guy
Dr. Guy Pardon ( )
Atomikos: Your Partner for Reliable
eBusiness Coordination
http://www.atomikos.com/
The information in this email is
confidential and only meant for the
addressee(s). The content of this email is
informal and will not be legally
binding for Atomikos.
Dr. Guy Pardon ( )
Atomikos: Your Partner for Reliable
eBusiness Coordination
http://www.atomikos.com/
The information in this email is
confidential and only meant for the addressee(s). The content of this email is
informal and will not be legally binding for Atomikos.
Dr. Guy Pardon (
)
Atomikos: Your Partner for
Reliable eBusiness Coordination
http://www.atomikos.com/
The information in this
email is confidential and only meant for the addressee(s). The content of this
email is informal and will not be legally binding for Atomikos.
