Exotica

Abstract

This paper is an overview of the Exotica project, currently in progress at the IBM Almaden Research Center. The project aims at exploring several research areas from advanced transaction management concepts to client/server architectures and mobile computing within the context of business processes and workflow management. The ultimate goal is to incorporate these ideas into IBM's products and prototypes. The project involves IBM groups in Almaden (U.S.A.), Hursley (U.K.), Boeblingen (Germany), and Vienna (Austria). In this paper we briefly describe two IBM products, FlowMark, a workflow management system, and MQSeries, a messaging system, as the environments in which we are focusing our research. We also discuss some of our results in the areas of availability, replication, distribution, and advanced transaction models, as well as describe our future research directions. 10