C H A P T E R  13

Transaction Management

Transactions are one of the most critical parts of building a reliable enterprise application. The most common type of transaction is a database operation. In a typical database update operation, a database transaction begins, data is updated, and then the transaction is committed or rolled back, depending on the result of the database operation. However, in many cases, depending on the application requirements and the backend resources that the application needs to interact with (such as an RDBMS, message-oriented middleware, an ERP system, and so on), transaction management can be much more complicated.

In the early days of Java application development (after JDBC was created but before the JEE standard or an application framework like Spring was available), developers programmatically controlled and managed transactions within application code. When JEE and, more specifically, the EJB standard became available, developers were able to use container-managed transactions (CMTs) to manage transactions in a declarative way. But the complicated transaction declaration in the EJB deployment descriptor was difficult to maintain and introduced unnecessary complexity for transaction processing. Some developers favored having more control over the transaction and chose bean-managed transactions (BMT) to manage transactions in a programmatic way. H....