OOPSLA'96Business Object Workshop III


An Object implementation of Network Centric Business Service Applications (NCBSAs):

Conversational Service Transactions, Service Monitor and an Application Style

Asit Dan and Francis Parr
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
Hawthorne, NY 10532


The Internet stretches traditional strict transaction processing concepts in several directions. First, transactions spanning multiple independent organizations may need to address enforcement of pairwise legal agreements rather than global data consistency. Second, a new transaction processing paradigm is required that supports different views of unit of business for all participants, i.e., service providers as well as end consumers. There may be several related interactions between any two interacting parties dispersed in time creating a long running conversation. Hence, persistent records of business actions need to be kept. Additionally, some actions and groups of actions may be cancellable (however, this may not mean that all effects are undone, e.g., non refundable payments). Finally, the greater variability in response time for network computing creates a need for asynchronous and event driven processing, in which correct handling of reissued and cancelled requests is critical. This paper presents a framework for development of NCBSA using CORBA services while satisfying the above requirements.


1. Introduction

1.1 Network Centric Computing is a New Context for Transaction Processing

The Internet and related technology trends (e.g., in end-user presentation interfaces and networking) have revolutionized the business transaction processing environment. Business-to-end-user and Business-to-Business interactions are both based on automated processing of asynchronous messages (i.e., service requests and responses). These interactions need to follow a long running conversation flow and need to have their effects made persistent. In such a network-centric business environment, independent business applications are created by autonomous organizations as Conversational Service Transactions (CST), where the global or complete knowledge of interactions amongst all applications can not be known. Since transactions and transaction processing systems lie at the core of business computing, it is important to explore the extensions required to the classical transaction monitor [8,3,15] for supporting such new types of applications and how network applications can be developed in this new environment. (The additional requirements of such applications are summarized in Section 1.2).

In [10], we advocate a service independence approach to application development and propose an execution environment for supporting long running conversational applications. We call the proposed approach COYOTE: for COver Yourself Transaction Environment, to emphasize that when several organizations participate in a business interaction across a public network, each organization can manage and be responsible for its own commitments and expectations but there is no party globally responsible for all activities contributing to the business interaction. In fact different participating organizations may have different views of where the boundaries of this particular business interaction may lie. Localized execution of an interaction of a service application may well be a classical ACID transaction[15] or may even follow various extended transaction models already proposed in the literature[12,14,21,4,24,7,1].

In this paper we first briefly summarize the requirements of a BSA , and the framework for development of a BSA. We then propose extensions to CORBA services for object based implementation of such business service applications.

 

1.2 Requirements on Infrastructure for Network Centric Business Service Applications

In addition to the traditional requirements for application development and runtime environment, service applications in a network centric environment need to have the following additional properties making them Conversational Service Transactions (CST):

Service independence: Each CST may be developed by an independent party where the complete interactions amongst all applications can not be known. Hence, the application development process is incremental.

Localized execution environment: The processing of business logic is distributed and each component (i.e., CST) is run under a local application monitor. This also implies that application development and execution environments may be heterogeneous, and very little should be assumed of other execution environments.

Well known interfaces: The interfaces of each CST as well as their operation semantics need to be known to other invoking applications. The interfaces are either known universally (e.g., EDI transactions) or are defined by the interacting parties via service contracts (see below).

Long running conversation: Between any two parties, there may be many related interactions dispersed in time (e.g., delayed cancellation or modification of an earlier service request). Hence, the intermediate computation states of a conversation need to be durable.

Asynchronous invocations: individual service action requests ( making up the long-running conversation between client and server) are asynchronous, i.e., response to a request may not arrive immediately. There are many factors contributing to this requirement. First, since very little can be assumed of other CSTs and their execution environments, the response time of other CSTs may be unpredictable. Second, a CST itself may request services of other CSTs, adding to this unpredictability. Some CSTs may also require inputs from human operators. Finally, network response time and disconnected operations will also add to this unpredictability.

Compensation: Since a CST may be long running, and traditional transactional execution of business logic across multiple organizations can not be assumed (see, further details in subsequent sections), Compensation of an earlier service request is a strong requirement. In real-world operations, this translates to refund of an earlier purchased item, cancellation of a reservation, exchanging items or changing the attributes of a previous request.

Co-ordinated invocations: In many applications, it is natural to request a set of complementary services from independent applications in an all-or-nothing manner of execution. An example of this requirement is co-ordinated purchases of items, such as, services of Hotel and Airline. The underlying runtime environment should ensure this all-or-nothing execution behaviour.

Service contracts: A service contract between two interacting parties (i.e., CSTs) documents their expected behaviours. It includes issues such as the interfaces that can be invoked, how long a conversation needs to be maintained and whether or not a service request can be compensated. The service contract needs to be enforced during execution time.

Query of interaction history: A CST may need to query all its durable past interactions with other CSTs and the current states of interactions.

Site Autonomy, Privacy and Implementation Hiding: A CST should be able to conceal from its requesters, whether parts of the service have been subcontracted out into the network; conversely the identity of the requester may sometimes need to be unavailable to any providers of subcontracted services.

1.3 Outline of the Paper

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2.1, we outline the Coyote approach: the conversational service transaction model, the Coyote monitor services and the application development model. We further illustrate these concepts with an example in Section 2.2. In Section 3, we describe how an object implementation of NCBSA and service monitor can be realized by extending the

CORBA services. Section 4 contains the summary and conclusions of the paper.

 

2. An overview of the COYOTE Approach

In this section we explain at a high level our proposed solution to meeting the needs of network centric service applications in terms of three components:

We then illustrate the approach with an example.

2.1 Components of the Approach

2.1.1 Conversational Service Transaction Model

We treat requests for services as the fundamental building block for network centric business service applications and define a simple integrity model for conversational service transactions. Each organization which wants to provide a network centric business service application (i.e., CST) defines a set of well defined service access interfaces. The examples of such independent NCBSAs are Hotel services, Airline services, etc. The interfaces provided by each NCBSA can be invoked by remote and/or other independent NCBSAs to access services provided by this one (see Figure 2). We further advocate the use of an extended transaction model and a monitor supporting such pairwise interactions. The key concepts are:

Valid and allowable service requests are defined in service contracts between interacting parties, and the service requests are monitored for enforcing this contract.

A client can request cancellation of a specific service request, a predefined grouping of requests or an entire conversation. However, there is no guarantee that the identified services will be completely undone; rather an application defined compensation action will be executed.

The monitor also provides runtime service interfaces to its local CSTs for co-ordinating their requests to other CSTs. A group of service requests to other CSTs are executed by the monitor in an all-or-nothing manner.

The monitor also provides to its local CSTs a persistent application level log and execution of service requests reliably in the face of reissued requests. This is required especially when response times (for the possibly distributed processing) do not meet the clients expectations.

2.2 Transaction Monitors and Specific Features of a Coyote Monitor

Coyote is a transaction monitor and hence, provides all the basic services expected of a transaction monitor. The basic functions of a standard transaction monitor are well known, e.g. CICS, Encina, Tuxedo [3,15,9]. We summarize them briefly here in order to highlight the additional properties of a Coyote monitor.

Transaction monitors are responsible for scheduling transaction invocations. Transaction programs or applications are registered to the transaction monitor in an administrative operation. Each registered application has a function name known to clients so that they can request it; associated with this function name is a registered entry point or program which is scheduled when a request for that function is received.

Incoming requests to the transaction monitor appear as messages typically from remote clients. An incoming request is logically queued by the transaction monitor until computing resource is available to execute it. This occurs when some other transaction completes and frees up a process or thread in a pool managed by the monitor. When a thread becomes available, the transaction monitor allocates it to the first queued incoming request, starts on the allocated thread the application program registered to the requested function, passing it any additional parameter data also in the request.

Having started the transactional application in response to an incoming message, the transaction monitor is responsible for supervising the execution of the transactional application. In particular it will intercept all outbound requests (to recoverable resource managers such as databases that may be local or remote) and to other remote transaction monitors if this transaction monitor can participate in managing a distributed transactional protocol.

Finally the transaction monitor is also responsible for the transactional behaviour of the applications which it monitors. Definition of standard ACID transactional properties (i.e., atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability) can be found in [16,15]. A primary function of standard transaction monitors is to provide a commit/abort protocol. This allows a transactional application to be ABORTED if either a serious error is detected by the monitor during processing of the transactional application or if the application explicitly requests it. The transaction monitor will then ensure that all effects of processing on behalf of this transaction instance are undone in the persistent resources of the participating resource managers (e.g., databases).

 

A schematic view of a Coyote monitor is shown in Figure 1. At this level the architectures of a classical ACID transaction monitor and a Coyote monitor are essentially the same. However, a Coyote monitor differs from above summary description of standard transaction monitor functions in several respects.

A server application started by a Coyote monitor is not by default an ACID transaction; rather it is a durable conversation for which there is no ``system guaranteed'' abort operation to undo all its effects.

An application level log of all interactions with the client and other remote resources and transaction managers is maintained by the Coyote monitor.

A service application registered with the Coyote monitor can have a group of programs or interfaces associated with it. The interfaces define the primary action, and its associated application defined compensation and modify actions.

Multiple related interactions that follow a logical conversation thread may be dispersed in time, and hence, the monitor maintains persistent conversation states and an interaction history.

The Coyote monitor has special support for enabling reliable execution of a service request on behalf of a particular conversation (with a particular user) even if action requests are reissued, and is reliably compensated (by the application defined compensation action) if the user so requests.

The Coyote monitor checks validity of invocation sequence as defined by the application during its registration.

The monitor also enforces service contract, i.e., checks to see if the user is allowed to invoke this method.

Ÿ The Coyote monitor provides additional features to compensate an entire conversation or a defined group of service requests within the conversation, should compensation of the group be explicitly requested or automatically if some essential request within the group fails to execute successfully.

In short the novel features of a Coyote monitor is that it shifts the definition of a transactional application away from the concept of a system guarantee that all persistent effects are removed on failure, towards supporting the concept of persistent conversations in which it is easy to provide and manage application defined compensation of actions and provide the end-user with a reliable view of cancelling, reissuing and modifying particular service requests.

 

Coyote application Development model

A network centric service application has to guide a client which may be an end-user or possibly another unknown program through a unit of business. This is typically a long running interaction, in which there are short bursts of automated activity at the Coyote server, interspersed with periods of waiting for, subcontracted servers in the network to respond, the user to decide what to do next or activities to happen in the real world as part of the service fulfilment, goods to be moved, money to transfer or time between a reservation and use to elapse.

Thus a Coyote application consists of:

Interfaces: its service interfaces (specifically service contract) presented to clients; the application will also depend on the service interface definitions for any services which it uses from other applications in the network in a subcontracting mode.

Action methods: the implementations of each short running action which can occur in providing the service; each action involves responding to a specific event, processing based on this event and the state of the service conversation, and sending out messages and action requests to the client and other servers.

Scheduling rules: the definition of the application's trigger events, i.e., combinations of response messages, time-outs and user requests, which will trigger execution of an action by the application, and the rules to determine which action is to be scheduled when events occur.

The developer of a network centric service application is required to provide all of the above information. The Coyote monitor plays the role of enforcing constraints defined in the service interface, gathering and saving the event data, interpreting the scheduling rules of the application, and then triggering the execution of action methods for the application following those rules.

We claim that the Coyote approach provides both a convenient and powerful structure for developing network centric service applications and a coherent model for characterizing their behaviour.

 

An example: conference trip reservation

Consider a typical multi-organization long running business application: Travel planning including conference registration.

Figure 2 shows the participating organizations and their interactions. The end-users need to make complete travel plans associated with attending this conference. Each may run a local travel arrangement application on his/her desktop/laptop, but is more likely to contact an intermediary, Travel Service provider, that co-ordinates various end-user service requests, and maintains special business relationships with various business service providers (e.g., airlines, hotels). As part of the conference registration, the conference organizers provide (via the Conference service application) not only a seat at the conference and conference proceedings, but also arranges hotel accommodations for the entire duration of the conference. The conference organizers make special arrangements with the hotel (via the Hotel Service application) to provide this accommodation. They also collect appropriate fee (via the Acquirer gateways) through the credit service providers (e.g., Amex, Visa, MC). The end-user provides all the necessary information by processing an HTML form, and is typically unaware of all the business activities behind the scene.

 

An end-user may also require a separate arrangement with the same or another hotel for an extended stay unrelated to the conference. For example, the end-user may decide to arrive early for some unrelated business activity (e.g., giving a talk at the local University) and stay a day longer beyond the conference for some sight-seeing. Additional activities may depend on various factors: availability of suitable flights, availability of hotel accommodation, and of course, no conflict in schedule. The conference provider is clearly not interested in providing services beyond what is absolutely required for conference attendance. The unpredictable schedule of a busy client may also require partial attendance or modification of the schedule on-the-fly.

The key requirements imposed by this overall application on the participating organizations and their underlying systems are as follows. Multiple organizations (e.g., Service providers for Travel, Conference, Hotel, Airline, etc.) need to interact to provide all the required services to the end-user. All the services demanded by an end-user may not be known in advance, and may change during the course of the conference. For example, the requested and granted services may be cancelled by (or on-behalf of) the end-user at a later time. However, each organization is responsible for delivering its services. Each service provider develops its own application without the a-priori global knowledge of interactions across all organizations. Finally, the organizations do not need to be in constant communication during the course of this long running overall application.

Multiple interactions between server parties (e.g., Registration and Cancellation) may be related. Note that implementation of the ``registration at the conference site'' service, results in invocation of services that atomically perform reservation of a hotel bed and conference registration fee payment, as well as local book keeping such as updating the number of proceedings to be printed, etc.. Here, each transaction accesses/modifies its local database(s) in an atomic fashion, and hence, preserves desired integrity relationships within a site. Each organization is also responsible for managing its own interactions with other organizations and hence needs its own persistent application log of the interactions between them.

In the above example, the travel server co-ordinates its interactions with conference, hotel and airline sites. The conference program server is responsible for ensuring all services that come with a conference registration, and co-ordinates its interactions with the hotel and the acquirer gateway servers. The end-user or the travel server never gets involved in the conference program server backed activities.

Each site also passes minimal (essential) information about its clients to other servers as well as hides its implementation of the ways it provides the services, particularly if it is dependent on the services of other sites. Without such information barriers, all participating sites may be aware of the relationship across all other (potentially hostile) sites. It may also jeopardize the businesses of intermediate sites since the end-client may directly contact final service providers. Additionally, the global state maintenance may impose unduly burden on each service provider.

The proposed Conversational Service Transaction model and runtime services provided by a Coyote monitor aids in the development of NCBSA. In the next Section, we will explore how these services

can be provided to an oo implemented NCBSA.

3. An Object implementation of Network Centric Business Service Applications (NCBSAs)

The preceding sections defined the need for NCBSAs and the requirements which must be met by an infrastructure for them. However, this was done with no reference to objects. In this section we take up the question of how one would implement both the NCBSAs and their infrastructure using Object technology and concepts. This adds a level of detail both to the description of NCBSAs and their required infrastructure; it also raises some interesting questions about ways in which Object standards could be extended to assist in the evolution of cross enterprise electronic services.

 

3.1 Service Invocations and Service Contracts

Being able to contact, uniquely identify, and interact with service invocations is a key part of the NCBSA economy. Hence we will need a ServiceInvocation class. Particular services such as:

combined conference trip booking service

airline reservation service

hotel booking service

would be subclassed from this ServiceInvocation class.

 

It is usually the case that ServiceInvocation objects have to be persistent, e.g., a travel booking has to survive from the time that the booking is made to the time when it is used, possibly months later. During this lifetime there will be a number of specific interactions with the client of the service defined as actions in the preceding section.

These actions are an important part of the interface of the service invocation, but are associated with the implementation of the service invocation only via a level of indirection. Hence rather than treat these actions as methods of the ServiceInvocation object directly, we introduce a ServiceContract object associated with each ServiceInvocation object defining its interface (see Figure 3). The methods of the ServiceContract object will be the actions of the service invocation. To illustrate, in the hotel booking example, creation of booking, upgrade or date change of a booking and cancellation are independent actions on the hotel service invocation. These functions are then the defined methods on the service contract.

 

3.1.1 Properties of ServiceContracts: sequence checking for reliable execution

Besides defining the set of action interfaces of a service invocation, a ServiceContract contains all information which defines the responsibilities undertaken by the provider of the service. The ServiceContract object (SCO) provides information on the responsiveness committed to by the server. This may be provided in the form of the mean and some high percentile response times for responses to action requests which could be used by clients to set reasonable time outs. There could also be a more general indication of whether processing was interactive or batch oriented.

Another function of the SCO is that it defines sequencing rules for valid sequences of actions within a service invocation. This is particularly valuable in a network centric environments where there is great variation both in message delivery time and in processing response time. Service requests and their actions are uniquely numbered. The ServiceContract object implementation enforces these sequencing rules, thus eliminating invalid or duplicated requests. Thus a series of calls to a ServiceContract object, newBooking, newBooking, upgrade, cancel, upgrade, cancel, will actually be received at the ServiceInvocation object as the filtered sequence: newBooking, upgrade, cancel. The sequencing rules cause two newBooking actions to a single service invocation to be treated as duplicates and cancel is supposed to be a "final" action which cannot be followed by other actions on the same service invocation. Other invalid sequences would be reported back to the client as errors. Finally, ServiceContract object (which is created upon invocation of a BSA by an user and based on the service contract defined a priori between the invoking user and the service provider) decides which

action requests are to be permitted.

In summary, the ServiceContract interface defines properties of the service made visible to external clients usually in other organizations. The ServiceInvocation offers an interface to the implementation of the service, called from within the service provider's organization.

 

3.1.2 Separating monitor checking aspects of a services from the service implementation

An alternate way of looking at this separation between ServiceContract and Service Invocation is as follows. In providing business services in a conventional network environment the value of transaction monitors is widely accepted. Orbs, as presently defined by OMG standards provide a limited set of the scheduling, interface enforcement and reliability management provided in existing transaction managers. In a network centric business service environment extensions to transaction manager functionality are required to handle the greater openness, extended transaction models and more ad hoc cross organizational interactions of a public network environment.

In these terms the ServiceContract object represents processing to provide rule and interface enforcement for a BSA. Users of this service see and make method calls on the ServiceContract object, not the ServiceInvocation object which implements the service. The ServiceInvocation object represents the actual implementation of the service and has method interfaces which would be called by the transaction monitor after it had allocated an execution thread to an incoming request.

 

3.1.3 ServiceEventHandler and asynchronous responses to subcontracts of the service implementation

A Network Centric Business Service Application ( NCBSA) is typically incremental. It provides a ServiceContract interface, but its service implementation makes wide use of other services available in the network. For the best response time to clients, these "subcontract" service invocations will be made in parallel ( since it is assumed they are executing on independent server engines scattered across the network). Hence the action requests made to subcontract services will need to be asynchronous calls.

Therefore, in this environment service invocations last for a long time, however , are actively executing only in brief bursts when triggered by any request from the service invocation client, or a new asynchronous reply arrives from a subcontract service. It is convenient to structure the ServiceInvocation implementation as a set of internal methods and a set of event driven scheduling rules. Once again we separate out the functionality which is really rules to be followed as part of the monitor scheduling into a separate object , i.e., ServiceEventHandler. There is one ServiceEventHandler for each ServiceInvocation. Methods in the ServiceEventHandler correspond to different trigger events relevant to this ServiceInvocation. The methods in the ServiceInvocation object are now the segments of algorithmic processing which are shceduled in response to some trigger event following the rules in the ServiceEventHandler.

More specifically, the ServiceEventHandler is driven whenever a new reply or message arrives from a subcontract or a new request arrives from the client of this service invocation. Using knowledge of which other events & replies have already been received, together with the rules defined in the ServiceEventHandler, the appropriate method of the ServiceInvocation is allocated a thread and called.

This observation reinforces the need to separate out ServiceContract object from ServiceInvocation object. Although the ServiceContract interface defines as its methods the set of action requests which can be made, the implementation (i.e. the set of methods on the ServiceInvocation object) will not be a set of independent procedures - one for each defined action. In general in the presence of asynchronous responses to subcontracted requests, a service invocation which allows clients to make action requests A and B, and processes action A by sending out subcontract network requests AF1, AF2 would be more likely to have a set of methods:

method1 - in response to A: sends out sub requests AF1, AF2

method2 - timely relies to AF1 and AF2 are received; respond to A

method3 - a request for B is received before responses to AF1, AF2 from a preceding A

method4 - replies to AF1 and AF2 are not both received in time: report progress only on

outstanding request

method5 - handle late arriving responses to AF1 or AF2 after progress report to client.

The above example shows that even though the client has a set of actions which can be applied to a service invocation, and are defined as the methods of the ServiceContract, the ServiceInvocation is best implemented as a ServiceEventHandler with rules for choosing what action should be scheduled in response to a particular network event and the ServiceInvocation object itself whose methods are the specific processing called as a result. The ServiceInvocation methods provide a complete implementation of the service, but not in 1-1 correspondence with the actions callable by the client.

A second aspect of ServiceEventHandler is that it intercepts all outbound requests from the ServiceInvocation object to the outside world. To do this, part of the ServiceEventHandler interface, is a method through which requests can be made identifying a target ServiceContract object and an action call on it. Since the set of BSAs in the network is open-ended, the ServiceEventHandler just converts these outbound requests into one way method calls on the target ServiceContract object without any type checking of the parameters. By intercepting outbound requests from the ServiceInvocation object, the ServiceEventHandler sets its internal state so that it can recognize incoming events and parse when an event is a reply to an outstanding request for service. The ServiceEventHandler also persistently logs so that the service invocation can understand after a failure what has been asked of the rest of the network.

Both logging and request-reply correlation can be done in the ServiceEventHandler without any knowlege of the semantics or typing of the requests being passed through.

A third aspect of the ServiceEventHandler is that beyond doing request-reply correlation, it understands higher level grouping constructs. Part of the rules handled in it deal with coordination of groups of requests which must either all be executed successfully or, on failure, have all the outbound requests conpensated. Once again by providing this as a declarative semantic rule to be interpreted by the ServiceEventHandler, the task of developing a ServiceInvocation object for a particular service is greatly simplified.

3.1.4 Further comparison of this object structure with Transaction Monitors

Transaction monitors classically completely surround the transactional applications which they support. A monitor provides an external interface to clients used to receive requests and drive the appropriate transaction applications. It also intercept all outbound requests from the transactional application to databases, file servers or services on other nodes, to insert hooks for transactional co-ordination, scheduling and monitoring. Orbs have not as yet defined interfaces to play this surrounding role. But in order to have a productive environment for developing NCBSAs using object technology we need to be able to define the necessary infrastructure support in object terms. The ServiceContract captures functionality which a monitor would have to provide as inbound request processing; the ServiceEventHandler is providing the monitor services for outbound request handling.

Transaction monitors build their inbound and outbound request handling support for a given application based on metadata provided when the transactional application is registered with or defined to the monitor. In our approach the ServiceInvocation object provides the essential implementation while he ServiceContract and ServiceEventHandler provide the application specific metadata and the general processing which extend the Orb to enable it to function as a more general purpose monitor, meeting the needs of NCBSAs.

3.1.5 Compensation and Compensation Groups

So far we have said nothing about transactional semantics and co-ordination other than mentioning that this responsibility is supported in the ServiceEventHandler. Now in the world of business and of NCBSAs there is little reason to expect service invocations to be "abortable" at all times - in the sense that all permanent effects can be removed. Some services involve payments which are not refundable; bookings may have been made which beyond some point in time cannot be cancelled. Hence we talk about compensation and cancellation of services rather than abort as it used for transactions.

Compensation of service may occur at several levels:

compensation of an individual action: - action A has an inverse action undoA; clients of the service containing action A may use the inverse to undo it.

compensation of a ServiceInvocation: cancellation is a known action defined for many (but

possibly not for all) ServiceInvocation classes; it will end the ServiceInvocation instance stopping any subsequent actions to that instance. it will provide as complete a cancellation as is possible.

compensation group: a ServiceInvocation may sometimes want to group together several subcontract requests and have either all or none of them succeed. In addition, it may want other parts of the ServiceInvocation to be executed conditionally on the success of one of these groups.

The implementation of CompensationGroups is straightforward. If all service invocations in the group succeed, the group has succeeded; if one or more fail then the CompensationGroup is responsible for calling the cancel method on all the other successful members of the group. A CompensationGroup is defined by a BSA implementation which passes it as a rule to its ServiceEventHandler.

4. Summary and Conclusions

Service Transactions are an effective model to capture the semantics for adding service application to a network centric environment.

With the Coyote monitor services, we have defined the critical services which the transaction infrastructure need to provide to support network centric service applications. Key technical features provided by this monitor are:

The appropriate model for developing applications in this environment is based on:

Finally, for implementation of these applications and infrastructure, we have introduced the creation of ServiceContract object and ServiceEventHandler objects dynamically per service invocation instance. The detailed guidelines for implementing these objects providing monitor services can be found in [10]. This set of concepts, service transactions, monitor and application structure has considerable practical implications as to how one can most effectively construct middle tier servers in a network centric service environment.

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OOPSLA'96Business Object Workshop III