Day 18. Building Bean-Managed Transaction Beans

On Day 17, “Building Container-Managed Transaction Beans,” we covered EJBs with container-managed transactions (CMTs). Today we'll closely examine the other type of transaction demarcation, the bean-managed transaction (BMT), which is the programmatic approach of performing transaction demarcation on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform. This will be illustrated through an example of how to develop, deploy, and run an EJB with bean-managed transaction demarcation. We'll explore the types of beans that can perform bean-managed transactions and the transaction semantics of each method that we use. We'll discuss the situations in which you can use this type of transaction and any restrictions you might encounter when using it. You'll also learn how to deploy such a bean into application servers and how to set its deployment descriptors.

Toward the end of learning to implement bean-managed transactions in your enterprise applications, the following is a summary of today's activities:

• Learn when and why to use bean-managed transactions

• Review the type of transactions used in a bean-managed transaction

• Learn which types of EJBs support bean-managed transactions

• Work through a step-by-step example of developing an EJB with the bean-managed transaction demarcation

• Deploy the example on our two application server environments