Patterns: Implementing Self-Service in an SOA Environment

Chapter 7. Application and system design guidelines 189

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Transaction inflow management (new in JCA 1.5) enables a resource

adapter to propagate an imported transaction to an application server.

This contract also allows a resource adapter to transmit transaction

completion and crash recovery calls initiated by an EIS, and ensures that

the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) properties of

the imported transaction are preserved.

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Message inflow management (new in JCA 1.5) enables a resource adapter

to asynchronously deliver messages to message endpoints residing in the

application server independent of the specific messaging style, messaging

semantics, and messaging infrastructure used to deliver messages. This

contract also serves as the standard message provider pluggability

contract that allows a wide range of message providers (Java Message

Service (JMS), Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM), etc.) to be plugged

into any J2EE compatible application server via a resource adapter.

These system contracts are transparent to the application developer. They do

not implement these services themselves.

򐂰 Resource adapter deployment and packaging

A resource adapter provider develops a set of Java interfaces/classes as part

of its implementation of a resource adapter. The Java interfaces/classes are

packaged together with a deployment descriptor to create a Resource

Adapter Archive (represented by a file with an extension of .rar). This

Resource Adapter Module is used to deploy the resource adapter into the

application server.

For a full description of all of the system contracts listed above, please refer to

the J2EE Connector Architecture Version 1.5 specification. All of the above

contracts discussed are valid for both managed and non-managed environment.

7.4.2 Managed and non-managed environments

There are two different types of environments that a Java application using J2EE

Connectors can run in:

򐂰 Managed environment

The Java application accesses a resource adapter through an application

server such as WebSphere Application Server. Management of connections,

transactions, and security is provided by this application server. The Java

application developer does not have to code this management manually.