Transaction Management Support for Cooperative Applications

230 Pages·1998·6.204 MB·English

by  Wolfgang Klas, Rolf A. de By (auth.), Rolf A. de By, Wolfgang Klas, Jari Veijalainen (eds.)

TRANSACTION
MANAGEMENT SUPPORT
FOR
COOPERATIVE APPLICATIONS
THE KLUWER INTERNATIONAL SERIES
IN ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE
TRANSACTION
MANAGEMENT SUPPORT
FOR
COOPERATlVE APPLICATIONS
edited by
Rolf A. de By
International Institute tor
Aerospace Survey and Earth Sciences
The Netherlands
Wolfgang K1as
0/
University Ulm
Germany
Jari Veijalainen
0/
University Jyväskylä
Finland
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available
from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4613-7600-2 ISBN 978-1-4615-5679-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4615-5679-4
Copyright © 1998 by Springer Science+Business Media New York
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1998
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1998
AII rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photo
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.
Printed on acid-free pap er.
CONTENTS
Contributing Authors ix
Foreword
xi
Acknowledgments xiii
1 Introduction
Wolfgang Klas, RolfA . de By and Jari Veijalainen
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 TransCoop Objectives 2
1.3 Application Requirements--The Driving Force Behind the Scene 4
1.4 Specification Language for Cooperative Transactions 6
1.5 Cooperative Transaction Model 6
1.6 Roots and Background of the Project 7
1. 7 Outline of the Book 8
2 The Transcoop Paradigm t 1
Jari Veijalainen, RolfA . de By and Karl Aberer
2.1 Introduction 11
2.2 Motivation 12
2.3 Methodology Applied 13
2.4 Technical Prerequisites 15
2.5 Terminology and Central Notions 20
2.6 Positioning TransCoop Within the CSCW Field 23
3 Transaction Models in Cooperative Work--
An Overview 27
Jari Veijalainen, Jurgen Wiisch, Juha Puustjiirvi, Henry Tirri and Olli Pihlajamaa
3.1 Introduction 27
3.2 A Brief History of the Term Transaction Model 28
3.3 Main Techniques to Implement the ACID Properties 38
3.4 Generalizing ACID 40
3.5 Advanced Transaction Models 48
3.6 What is a Transaction Model, What is a Transactional Framework? 57
v
vi
4 Application Requirements 59
Thomas Tesch, Peter Verkoulen, Aarno Lehtola, Jari Veijalainen, Olli Pihlajamaa
and Aija Sladek
4.1 Introduction 59
4.2 Requirements from Workflow 61
4.3 Requirements from Design for Manufacturing 71
4.4 Requirements from Cooperative Document Authoring 80
4.5 Consolidated Requirements 85
5 The TransCoop Architecture 93
Aarno Lehtola, RolfA . de By, Henry Tirri and Jurgen Wasch
5.1 Introduction 93
5.2 The TransCoop Reference Architecture 96
5.3 Comparison to Related Work 104
5.4 Implementation Choices and Discussion 111
6 The Transcoop Specification Environment 115
Frans J F aase, Susan Even and RolfA . de By
6.1 Introduction 115
6.2 Requirements 117
6.3 A Cooperative Specification Language Paradigm 118
6.4 Example Cooperative Scenario 120
6.5 Definition of Organizational Aspects 123
6.6 Defmition of Transactional Aspects 128
6.7 Integration of Organizational and Transactional Aspects 132
6.8 The CoCoA Language 134
6.9 Reflections on the Formal Model of CoCoA 135
6.10 The CoCoA Tool Set 138
6.11 Related Work 138
6.12 Discussion 140
Appendix: The CoCoA Syntax 143
7 The TransCoop Transaction Model 149
Justus Klingemann, Thomas Tesch, Jurgen Wasch and Wolfgang Klas
7.1 Introduction 149
7.2 Overview of the CoAct Model 150
7.3 Cooperative Activities 153
7.4 Running Example 154
7.5 A Formal Model of History Merging 155
7.6 Discussion of Other Relations in the Context of CoAct 166
7.7 Summary 171
8 The TransCoop Demonstrator System 173
Justus Klingemann and Susan Even
8.1 Introduction 173
8.2 Overview 174
8.3 The Demonstrator Application 177
8.4 The Specification Environment 180
8.5 The Runtime Environment 184
8.6 Summary 191
9 Conclusions 193
Susan Even, Thomas Tesch and Jari Veijalainen
9.1 Reflections on the Cooperative Transaction Model 194
9.2 Implementation of Concepts 195
9.3 Critical Assessment 196
9.4 Extensions to the Specification Environment 197
9.5 Lessons for Transaction Management Research and Development 198
References 201
Index 217
vii
Contributing Authors
Karl Aberer
GMD-IPSI, Darmstadt, Germany
Rolf A. de By
International Institute for Aerospace Survey & Earth Sciences, lTC,
Enschede, The Netherlands
Susan Even
Department of Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede,
The Netherlands
Frans J. Faase
Tecnomatix Machining Automation B.V., Enschede, The Netherlands
Wolfgang Klas
Department of Computer Science, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany
Justus Klingemann
GMD-IPSI, Darmstadt, Germany
Aarno Lehtola
VTT Information Technology, Information Systems, Espoo, Finland
OlIi Pihlajamaa
VTT Information Technology, Multimedia, Espoo, Finland
ix
x TRANSACTION MANAGEMENT SUPPORT FOR COOPERATIVE APPLICATIONS
J uha Puustjarvi
Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Aija Sladek
Senior Systems Analyst, Nokia Telecommunications, Nokia Group, Finland
Thomas Tesch
GMD-IPSI, Darmstadt, Germany
Henry Tirri
Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Jari Veijalainen
Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of
Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla, Finland
Peter Verkoulen
Origin IT Services B.V., Eindhoven, The Netherlands
J iirgen Wisch
GMD-IPSI, Darmstadt, Germany
Foreword
Transaction Management Support for Cooperative Application is a comprehensive
report on a successful international project, called TRANSCOOP, carried out from
1994 to 1997 by a group of European scientists. But the book is also much more than
that, namely, an ambitious attempt to integrate Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
(CSCW), Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), and Transaction Processing (TP)
technologies.
The very term {\em cooperative transactions} is in itself contradictory. Cooperation
technologies, such as CSCW, aim at providing a framework for information exchange
between cooperating (human) participants. In contrast, traditional transaction
technologies allow concurrent users to operate on shared data, while providing them
with the illusion of complete isolation from each other. To overcome this contradiction,
the TRANSCOOP researchers had to come up with a new and original notion of
correctness of concurrent executions, based on controlled exchange of information
between concurrent users.
Merging histories in accordance with prespecified commutativity rules among
concurrent operations provides transactional guarantees to activities such as cooperative
designing, which until now had to be carried out sequentially. As an interesting
consequence, it also provides a basis for management of consistency between
disconnected or mobile users who operate independently and yet, must occasionally
reconcile their work with each other.
The theory and technology presented in this book are preceded by a rigorous analysis
of requirements presented by diverse classes of cooperative applications, ranging from
cooperative authoring, through design for manufacturing, to interorganizational
workflows. Based on these requirements, the authors define a language that is suitable
for the specification of cooperative activities. The language is based on a formal model
and provides a collection of tools that allow the users to reason about the correctness
of specifications, rather that relying on mechanisms that detect possible violations at
run-time. The transaction model introduced in this book combines the use of private
workspaces that allow individual participants to work independently, with
synchronization mechanisms that allow them to combine their work to form a coherent
whole. Finally, the authors show how the new transactional concepts developed in the
project can be mapped into the transaction manager of an object-oriented database
management system to provide a clean and efficient implementation.
xi