Implementing fault-tolerant distributed applications using objects and multi-coloured actions

The authors develop some control structures suitable for composing fault-tolerant distributed applications using atomic actions (atomic transactions) as building blocks. The authors describe how such structures may be implemented using the concept of multicolored actions. The reasons why other control structures, in addition to nested and concurrent atomic actions, are desirable and are identified, and three structures are proposed: serializing actions, glued actions, and top-level independent actions. A number of examples are used to illustrate their usefulness. A technique based on the concept of multicolored actions is presented as a uniform basis for implementing all of the three action structures presented