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cJoin: Join with communicating transactions†

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2014

ROBERTO BRUNI ,
HERNÁN MELGRATTI  and
UGO MONTANARI
ROBERTO BRUNI
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa Largo Bruno Pontecorvo 3, I-56127 Pisa, Italy Email: bruni@di.unipi.it; ugo@di.unipi.it
HERNÁN MELGRATTI
Affiliation:
Departamento de Computacién, FCEyN, Universidad de Buenos Aires - CONICET Pabellón I, Ciudad Universitaria, (C1428EGA) Buenos Aires, Argentina Email: hmelgra@dc.uba.ar
UGO MONTANARI
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa Largo Bruno Pontecorvo 3, I-56127 Pisa, Italy Email: bruni@di.unipi.it; ugo@di.unipi.it
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Abstract

This paper proposes a formal approach to the design and programming of long running transactions (LRTs). We exploit techniques from process calculi to define cJoin, which is an extension of the Join calculus with few well-disciplined primitives for LRT. Transactions in cJoin are intended to describe the transactional interaction of several partners, under the assumption that any partner executing a transaction may communicate only with other transactional partners. In such case, the transactions run by any party are bound to achieve the same outcome (i.e., all succeed or all fail). Hence, a distinguishing feature of cJoin, called dynamic joinability, is that ongoing transactions can be merged to complete their tasks and when this happens either all succeed or all abort. Additionally, cJoin is based on compensations i.e., partial executions of transactions are recovered by executing user-defined programs instead of providing automatic rollback. The expressiveness and generality of cJoin is demonstrated by many examples addressing common programming patterns. The mathematical foundation is accompanied by a prototype language implementation, which is an extension of the JoCaml compiler.

Information

Type
Special Issue: Objects and Services
Information
Mathematical Structures in Computer Science , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , March 2015 , pp. 566 - 618
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

†

Research supported by the EU FET-GC2 IST-2004-16004 Integrated Project Sensoria, the Italian MIUR Project IPODS (PRIN 2008), the ANPCyT Project BID-PICT-2008-00319, and the UBACyT Project 20020090300122.

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