An animation tool for exploring transactions in a DE

The concept of a digital ecosystem (DE) has been used to explore scenarios in which multiple online services and resources can be accessed by users without there being a single point of control. In previous work we have described how the so-called transaction languages can express concurrent and distributed interactions between online services in a transactional environment. In this paper we outline how transaction languages capture the history of a long-running transaction and highlight the benefits of our true-concurrent approach in the context of DEs. This includes support for the recovery of a long-running transaction whenever some failure is encountered. We introduce an animation tool that has been developed to explore the behaviours of long-running transactions within our modelling environment. Further, we discuss how this work supports the declarative approach to the development of open distributed applications.