Day 17. Building Container-Managed Transaction Beans

On Day 16, “Understanding Transactions,” you learned about both the programmatic and the declarative approaches to transaction management. Today, we'll focus on developing EJBs that use the declarative approach of transaction demarcation. In this approach, the EJB container manages that transaction boundary on behalf of the EJB, behind the scenes, according to the setting found in the bean's deployment descriptor. On Day 18, “Building Bean-Managed Transaction Beans,” you'll learn how to develop an EJB with bean-managed transaction demarcation, which is a topic for advanced developers. One of the powerful features of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) architecture is to let the EJB container manage all the common services, such as transaction, security, and persistence. Doing so reduces your development efforts, yet adds robustness and flexibility to your applications.

The following summarizes what you will be learning today to build applications with container-managed transactions:

• Learn why you would use container-managed transactions

• Explore which EJB types can use container-managed transactions, and their restrictions

• Learn to define the home and component interfaces, and implement an EJB class with a container-managed transaction

• Learn to write the deployment descriptor for an EJB with a container-managed transaction

• Learn to compile, package, and deploy an EJB in a container

• Learn to write a client that accesses an EJB with a container-managed transaction