Day 16. Understanding J2EE Transactions

Today, we'll cover both local and global J2EE transactions. On Day 9, “Using JDBC to Connect to a Database,” you learned how to use local transactions to handle JDBC calls, and on Day 13, “Understanding JMS and Message-Driven Beans,” you learned local transaction to handle Java Message Service (JMS) messages. Today, we will focus on both local and distributed transactions through components and applications across all J2EE tiers. We will discuss the Java Transaction API (JTA), and show how it abstracts transaction management and makes this complex task completely transparent to developers. Concepts such as transaction level of isolation, transaction attributes, and demarcation managements will be highlighted. We will also shed light on both bean-managed transactions and container-managed transactions, which are the subjects of the next two days.

The following summarizes the activities that you'll be learning today:

• Understand transaction fundamentals

• Understand the basic types of transactions: local and distributed

• Learn about the JTA, which manages transactions in J2EE applications

• Learn how to use transactions across all J2EE tiers

• Give a working example of distributed transactions using both JMS and JDBC resources in one global transaction