Current web-service composition languages, such as BPEL, provide inferior support for transaction management. Consequently, specifications written in these languages are needlessly complex and hard to reuse. Furthermore, the languages themselves are not transactionally extensible, making them hard to adapt to support new forms of web service composition. Using a unified mechanism for dealing with transaction management we are able to simplify BPEL specifications, making them more reusable, and also allowing for easy evolution of the language, addressing new forms of composition. In this paper we present DBCF, a framework that implements this unified mechanism. Moreover, we show how DBCF can be used as a basis for defining a BPEL extension that successfully addresses the above problems.