Update 2005-10: On October 01, 2005 OASIS announced a Call for Participation in a new Web Services Transaction (WS-TX) Technical Committee. According to the Charter, the purpose of the WS-TX Technical Committee is "to define a set of protocols to coordinate the outcomes of distributed application actions. The TC will specify an extensible framework for developing coordination protocols through continued refinement of the Web Services Coordination (WS-Coordination v 1.0) specification; in addition, the TC will continue refinement of protocols for two coordination types that use the WS-Coordination framework: atomic transaction (AT) and business activity (BA), based on the Web Services Atomic Transaction (WS-AtomicTransaction v 1.0) and Web Services Business Activity (WS-BusinessActivity v 1.0) specifications submitted to the TC. Collectively, these three specifications will be referred to as the WS-TX Specifications..."

[April 03, 2002] The IBM Web Services Transactions (WSTx) project "addresses the reliability concerns of business processes utilizing the emerging Web services platform to execute business transactions. The principals believe that a general-purpose coordination framework similar to the J2EE Activity Service would be highly desirable so as to support the variety of transaction models likely to emerge as businesses deploy solutions on the Web. Such a framework should offer the flexibility to coordinate participants with varying transactional capabilities, using standard protocols (such as SOAP), without compromising the autonomy of those participants. The WSTx project team is: (1) exploring the J2EE Activity Service (the state-of-the-art in distributed object transactions) as to how it can be employed to support existing extended transaction models; (2) exploring extensions the J2EE Activity Service, to include Web services as participants in distributed transactions; (3) defining Web service based transactional requirements, models to support those requirements, and quality of service issues; (4) designing and implementing Web service transaction models using a general-purpose coordination framework."

The Web Services Transactions (WSTx) project is a joint effort by Thomas Mikalsen, Isabelle Rouvellou, and Stefan Tai, all of the Advanced Enterprise Middleware group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, New York, USA.

From the WSTx online description: "The Web services platform offers a standards-based distributed computing model for providing and accessing business functions over the public Internet. When a business function is invoked through a Web service as part of a larger business process, the overall transactional behavior associated with that business process will depend on the transactional capabilities of the Web service. Further, a business process may involve one or more such business functions (invoked through one or more Web services), as well as other non-Web service participants (such as local resource managers). To support the desired transactional behaviour, coordination across all or some of these participants may be required. Yet, such coordination must respect the loose coupling and the autonomy of Web services. In particular, the degree to which a given Web service is willing to submit to such external coordination might depend on, for example, the identity of the client, the use of a trusted third party, a negotiated QoS, and so on... To realize this vision, the WSTx project is presently engaged in [research activities]..."