Implementing Isolation for Service-Based Applications

Loosely-coupled distributed systems can be difficult to design and implement correctly, with time-of-check-to-time-of-use flaws arising from the lack of isolation being of particular concern. It is not feasible to use traditional distributed ACID transactions to solve such problems because the business activities being integrated are typically long-running and the interacting participants have incomplete mutual trust. 'Promises' were recently proposed as a solution to this problem. This paper discusses how promise-based isolation can be implemented when resources are described by predicates over properties, rather than being identified explicitly.