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XA transactions using Spring

JTA/XA transactions without the J2EE container.

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

Page 3 of 5

Spring's transaction framework also provides the necessary tools for applications to define the transaction propagation behavior, transaction isolation and so forth. For declarative transaction management, the TransactionDefinition interface specifies the propagation behavior, which is very much similar to EJB CMT attributes. The TransactionAttribute interface allows the application to specify which exceptions will cause a rollback and which ones will be committed. These are the two crucial interfaces, which make the declarative transaction management very easy to use and configure, and we will see as we go through our use cases.

Asynchronous Message Consumption using Spring

Spring has always supported sending messages using JMS API via its JMS abstraction layer. It employs a callback mechanism, which consists of a message creator and a JMS template that actually sends the message created by the message creator.

Since the release of Spring 2.0, asynchronous message consumption has been made possible using the JMS API. Though Spring provides different message listener containers, for consuming the messages, the one that is mostly suited to both JEE and J2SE environments is the DefaultMessageListenerContainer (DMLC). The DefaultMessageListenerContainer extends the AbstractPollingMessageListenerContainer class and provides full support for JMS 1.1 API. It primarily uses the JMS synchronous receive calls( MessageConsumer.receive()) inside a loop and allows for transactional reception of messages. For J(2)SE environment, the stand-alone JTA implementations can be wired to use the Spring's JtaTransactionManager, which will be demonstrated in the following sections.

The JTA implementations

JBossTS

JBossTS, formerly known as Arjuna Transaction Service, comes with a very robust implementation, which supports both JTA and JTS API. JBossTS comes with a recovery service, which could be run as a separate process from your application processes. Unfortunately, it doesn't support out-of-the box integration with Spring, but it is easy to integrate as we will see in our exercise. Also there is no support for JMS resources, only database resources are supported.

Atomikos Transaction Essentials

Atomikos's JTA implementation has been open sourced very recently. The documentation and literature on the internet shows that it is a production quality implementation, which also supports recovery and some exotic features beyond the JTA API. Atomikos provides out of the box Spring integration along with some nice examples. Atomikos supports both database and JMS resources. It also provides support for pooled connections for both database and JMS resources.

Bitronix JTA

Bitronix's JTA implementation is fairly new and is still in beta. It also claims to support transaction recovery as good as or even better than some of the commercial products. Bitronix provides support for both database and JMS resources. Bitronix also provides connection pooling and session pooling out of the box.

 

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