Transaction Internet Protocol
charter-ietf-tip-01

The task of the TIP working group is to develop an Internet standard
two-phase commit protocol specification, to enable heterogeneous
Transaction Managers to agree on the outcome of a distributed
transaction, based upon the Internet-Draft TIP protocol specification
. [Note that since
references a modified version of the
Session Control Protocol (SCP), the TIP WG will also be responsible for
progression of SCP to Proposed Internet Standard.]

In many applications where different nodes cooperate on some work,
there is a need to guarantee that the work happens atomically. That is,
each node must reach the same conclusion as to whether the work is to
be completed (committed or aborted), even in the face of failures. This
behaviour is achieved via the use of distributed transactions,
employing a two-phase commit protocol (2-pc). The use of distributed
transactions greatly simplifies distributed applications programming,
since the number of possible outcomes is reduced from many to two, and
failure recovery is performed automatically by the transaction service
(Transaction Manager).

Key requirements to be met are, 1) the 2-pc protocol be independent of
the application-to-application communications protocol, such that it
may be used with any application protocol (especially HTTP), and 2) the
2-pc protocol be simple to implement and have a small working footprint
(to encourage ubiquitous implementation and offer wide applicability).

The first work item of the group is to develop a requirements document,
which describes at least one complete scenario in which the TIP
protocol is intended to be used, and describes the requirements on the
protocol with regards to:

• Simplicity
• Overhead/Performance
• Security

The protocols developed by this working group will be analyzed for
potential sources of security breach. Identified threats will be
removed from the protocol if possible, and documented and guarded
against in other cases.

The Internet-Draft document is to be used
as the input base document for the development of this 2-pc protocol
specification.

Due to extreme differences in the approach, the group will not consider
the CORBA OTS specification as a solution to its requirements.