S.K. Shrivastava
S.M. Wheater
University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 1990
This paper develops some control structures suitable for composing fault-tolerant distributed applications using atomic actions (atomic transactions) as building blocks, and then goes on to describe how such structures may be implemented using the concept of multi-coloured actions. We first identify the reasons why other control structures in addition to - by now well known - nested and concurrent atomic actions are desirable and then propose three new structures: serializing actions, glued actions and top-level independent actions. A number of examples are used to illustrate their usefulness. A novel technique, based on the concept of multi-coloured actions, is then presented as a uniform basis for implementing all of the three action structures presented here.