Java Enterprise in a Nutshell, Third Edition

Transaction Management

One of the advanced value-added features that Enterprise JavaBeans provides over regular remote objects is transaction management. The EJB container can broker transaction contexts on behalf of your EJBs, making sure to “do the right thing” in terms of handling transaction defers, commits, or rollbacks.

The Enterprise JavaBeans architecture relies on the Java Transaction API (JTA ) for transaction support. Chapter 16 provides a general overview of transaction management concepts and the JTA. In that chapter, you’ll also find some extended topics related to bean- and container-managed transactions with EJBs. If you’re looking for material specifically about transaction management within an EJB context, we recommend that you start with the material in this section and then turn to Chapter 16 if you need to know more about the general concepts of transaction management and the JTA. If you need to delve into the broader context of transaction management in general (e.g., if you need to integrate distributed transactions across multiple resource managers into your application), you may want to start with the general overview provided in Chapter 16, then return to the EJB-specific details provided here.

The EJB container is the principal player in the area of transaction management since it is responsible for either generating transactions around client interactions with the bean or detecting client-requested transactions and then notifying the EJB objects about ...