Comprehensive Monitor-Oriented Compensation Programming
This addresses the problem of ensuring correct implementation for security-critical activities like financial transactions in web services, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing compensation programming concepts.
The paper tackles the challenge of compensation programming in web service compositions, which is more dynamic than traditional exception handling due to its dependence on runtime execution flow, by proposing the use of runtime monitors to separate system building from compensation modeling, and demonstrates its applicability through a case study.
Compensation programming is typically used in the programming of web service compositions whose correct implementation is crucial due to their handling of security-critical activities such as financial transactions. While traditional exception handling depends on the state of the system at the moment of failure, compensation programming is significantly more challenging and dynamic because it is dependent on the runtime execution flow - with the history of behaviour of the system at the moment of failure affecting how to apply compensation. To address this dynamic element, we propose the use of runtime monitors to facilitate compensation programming, with monitors enabling the modeller to be able to implicitly reason in terms of the runtime control flow, thus separating the concerns of system building and compensation modelling. Our approach is instantiated into an architecture and shown to be applicable to a case study.