A Case Study for Distributed Business Transaction Coordination across Heterogeneous Platforms

Recently, more and more enterprises with large EIS systems have increasing business demands on enhancing the system's scalabilities and service abilities. They may want to reuse the existing business logic code deployed in the legacy systems, e.g. core banking systems, in the newly developing systems to meet the new business requirements. Therefore, a big challenge lies on that how to integrate these distributed business transactions running on modern and legacy systems and moreover, how to synchronize these distributed transitions to guarantee the transaction's ACID properties across heterogeneous platforms. In this paper, we adopts Web Service Atomic Transaction (WSAT) mechanism to propose a conceptual solution to address the problems of transactions' integration and coordination. A detailed analysis of the characterization of the proposed solution is carried out to obtain a flexible and extendable framework for the fast distributed transactions' coordination. A research WSAT based distributed communication system, which has been developed on IBM Mainframe Customer Information Control System (CICS) and Microsoft Windows WebSphere Application Server (WAS), and experimental results indicate that a full WSAT based communication architecture can remarkably increase the EIS's reliability, flexibility and interoperability.