Atomic distributed transactions
Guy Pardon, Cesare Pautasso · 2014
The REST architectural style supports the reliable interaction of clients with a single server. However, no guarantees can be made for more complex interactions which require to atomically transfer state among resources distributed across multiple servers. In this paper we describe a lightweight design for transactional composition of RESTful services. The approach -- based on the Try-Cancel/Confirm (TCC) pattern -- does not require any extension to the HTTP protocol. The design assumes that resources are designed to comply with the TCC pattern and ensures that the resources involved in the transaction are not aware of it. It delegates the responsibility of achieving the atomicity of the transaction to a coordinator which exposes a RESTful API.