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XA transactions using Spring

JTA/XA transactions without the J2EE container.

By Murali Kosaraju, JavaWorld.com, 04/27/07

Using J(2)EE application server has been a norm when high-end features like transactions, security, availability, and scalability are mandatory. There are very few options for java applications, which require only a subset of these enterprise features and, more often than not, organizations go for a full-blown J(2)EE server. This article focuses on distributed transactions using the JTA (Java Transaction API) and will elaborate on how distributed transactions (also called XA) can be used in a standalone java application, without a JEE server, using the widely popular Spring framework and the open source JTA implementations of JBossTS, Atomikos and Bitronix.

Distributed transaction processing systems are designed to facilitate transactions that span heterogeneous, transaction-aware resources in a distributed environment. Using distributed transactions, an application can accomplish tasks such as retrieving a message from a message queue and updating one or more databases in a single transactional unit adhering to the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) criteria. This article outlines some of the use cases where distributed transactions (XA) could be used and how an application can achieve transactional processing using JTA along with the best of the breed technologies. The main focus is on using Spring as a server framework and how one can integrate various JTA implementations seamlessly for enterprise level distributed transactions.

XA Transactions and the JTA API

Since the scope of the article is limited to using JTA implementations using the Spring framework, we will briefly touch upon the architectural concepts of distributed transaction processing.

XA Transactions

The X/Open Distributed Transaction Processing, designed by Open Group(a vendor consortium), defines a standard communication architecture that allows multiple applications to share resources provided by multiple resource managers, and allows their work to be coordinated into global transactions. The XA interfaces enable the resource managers to join transactions, to perform 2PC (two phase commit) and to recover in-doubt transactions following a failure.

Figure 1: Conceptual model of the DTP environment.

As shown in Figure 1, the model has the following interfaces:

1. The interface between the application and the resource manager allows an application to call a resource manager directly, using the resource manager's native API or native XA API depending on if the transaction needs to be managed by the transaction monitor or not.

2. The interface between the application and the transaction monitor (TX interface), lets the application call the transaction monitor for all transaction needs like starting a transaction, ending a transaction, rollback of a transaction etc.

3. The interface between the transaction monitor and the resource manager is the XA interface. This is the interface, which facilitates the two-phase commit protocol to achieve distributed transactions under one global transaction.

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