Re: 2-phase commit

On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 08:04:13PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> 
> Interesting/positive news on this front; the XA specification
> documents are now all available in PDF form "freely", from the Open
> Group, where they used to be fairly pricey.
A step in the right direction, but AFAIC it's too little, too late.
The impression I get, at least, is that it's as good as dead now: Java
may use it, but it hides the details anyway so it might as well not be
there--the Java way is to standardize the API but nothing that goes "on
the wire".  

Lots of proprietary middleware uses XA, but from what I hear there are
enough subtle differences to make mixing-and-matching of products risky
at best--the proprietary way is to bundle products that will work at
least marginally together, and relegate standards to a bullshit point
in the PowerPoint presentations.  "Based on industry standard" means
about the same as "based on a true story."

Then there's the fact that the necessary followup standards never got 
anywhere, and the fact that XA doesn't cope with threading really well.

Don't get me wrong, XA support may well be a good thing.  But at this
stage, personally I'd go for a good 2PC implementation first and worry 
about supporting XA later.


Jeroen