In browsing around the Web, as one occasionally does in a free nanosecond, I read an interesting article about twp-phase commit transactions by Gregor Hohpe of ThoughtWorks ('Your Coffee Shop Does Not Use Two Phase Commit'). Gregor comes at the subject from the direction opposite the one I usually take in this column, since I am of a TP persuasion, but he covers the same arguments that I have explored in the past and comes to similar conclusions.

As I write, the noise level that continues to be generated around open source application servers and their claims to be coming into the world of enterprise computing continues. In my view, the main reason why the noise travels so far and seems so loud has nothing to do with the reality of the situation and everything to do with the media's love of controversy.

This issue, in an uncharacteristic attempt to fit in with the Zeitgeist, I propose to depart slightly from my well-trodden path to the transaction manager and take a look at frameworks. I expect you can guess which particular framework I am going to take a pass at, too. For nearly as long as there have been microprocessors, there have been frameworks.

A realization has dawned across the industry that 'service-oriented architecture' is a good thing. In fact, this is less of a dawning and more of a reawakening.

As we've discussed over the past few issues, JTA-style transactions provide a way for multiple data updates to be tied together so application logic can operate safely in the assumption that it will succeed or fail consistently, even in the face of technical failures along the road.

One definition of a commodity is something that you take for granted. I'll bet there aren't many readers out there who wake in the morning and exclaim, 'Thank goodness there's air in the room to breathe!' Likewise, computer users will seldom give thanks for their operating systems, a proclamation like 'praise be to those at AT&T and BSD for giving me Unix!' would likely raise more eyebrows than nods around an average water cooler.

This month's article is again inspired by a posting on the weblogic.d eveloper.interest.transac tion newsgroup. The question (excerpted from the posting) was: Does the 10 in weblogic-ejb-jar.xml apply to transactions that are in a suspended state?

Most developers have at least heard of XA, which describes the standard protocol that allows coordination, commitment, and recovery between transaction managers and resource managers. Products such as CICS, Tuxedo, and even BEA WebLogic Server act as transaction managers, coordinating transactions across different resource managers.

Whatever your innermost feelings about the symbols, and however fondly you remember debugging network infrastructures with nothing more than a LAN sniffer and an uncanny ability to interpret 4k blocks of hex, it is fairly safe to say that Web services are here to stay. With the industry-wide support for the concept, and corresponding legions of emerging and released standards, they aren't going anywhere soon.

Another discussion based on a weblogic.developer.i nterest.transaction posting this month. It's a newsgroup that always proves to be a good source of information for the world at large when it comes to transactional behavior (and a good source of inspiration for me when the article time of the month rolls around again).