Patent ID: 8001246

Claim:
A computer enabled system for exposing distributed transaction services as web services, comprising: a transaction service gateway server, running on one or more processors, that operates to invoke one or more distributed transaction services on a distributed transaction server upon receiving a request in a web service message from a web service client, wherein the transaction service gateway server includes: a web service message engine to handle the web service message for the one or more distributed transaction services; and a plug-in interface that expands functionality of the web service message engine; and a plug-in shared library, associated with the plug-in interface, that includes a set of plug-in implementation functions, wherein the plug-in library uses a virtual table that stores one or more function pointers to at least one said plug-in implementation function for the plug-in interface, and wherein the web service message engine operates to access the virtual table in the plug-in shared library through the plug-in interface and use the at least one said plug-in implementation function to convert the web service message into one or more distributed transaction data structures, and use another plug-in implementation function in the plug-in shared library to convert a response received from the distributed transactional server into another web service message for the web service client, wherein the response is associated with another one or more distributed transaction data structures.