Chapter 5. Web Service Transaction service management

The Transaction Manager and related infrastructure are configured by means of properties files:

These files are located in the conf directory and are used to configure the demo application and the standalone module.

For the most part, the default values in these files do not need to be altered. However, the com.arjuna.ats.arjuna.objectstore.objectStoreDir property determines the location of the persistent store used to record transaction state. The default value of C:/temp/ObjectStore should be changed to a value appropriate to your system. In a production environment, this directory should be located on fault-tolerant media, such as a RAID array.

When a standalone coordinator is being used by an application, you must enable and modify two additional properties in the wstx.xml file:

These properties represent the URLs used by the client application to contact the standalone coordinator. They should be configured with the correct host name and port of the standalone coordinator.

The Web Service Transaction Manager component of the Transaction Service consists of a number of JAR files which contain the application’s class files, as well as Web service (WAR) files which expose the necessary services. Programmers include all these components in their application EAR file during application development, to simplify deployment of the transaction infrastructure. In production, you can install the Transaction Manager as a stand-alone application, to centralize configuration and management at the server level. The demonstration application shipped with JBoss Transaction Server includes a sample deployment descriptor which includes the Transaction Manager components in an application.

JBoss Transaction Service uses fixed endpoints for its underlying protocol communication. Therefore, problems may arise if multiple applications using the Transaction Service are deployed to the same server concurrently. To deploy several transactional applications in the same server, deploy the Transaction Manager as a separate application, rather than embedding it within the deployment of individual applications.

The coordinator directory in the JBoss Transaction Service installation assists in the configuration and deployment of a stand-alone transaction manager. In order to use this, you must:

Edit the build.xml included with the coordinator, so that it points to the application server installation where the transaction coordinator will be deployed, and the location of the JBoss Transaction Service installation. The files ws-c_jaxm_web-app.xml and ws-t_jaxm_web-app.xml in the dd/ directory of the coordinator are the deployment descriptors for the WS-C and WS-T WAR files. They contain templated URLs. During the build phase, ant substitutes the hostname and port values from the build.xml into these files.

Run ant, with target deploy-weblogic, deploy-jboss or deploy-webmethods, to create and deploy a new coordinator into the correct application server installation.

Next, point your client at the required coordinator, by generating the demo application and specifying the port and hostname of the coordinator.

It is not generally necessary to change the contents of the various deployment descriptors used by JBoss Transaction Service. However, if you do need to modify them they are all included in the coordinator module.

Not all JBoss Transaction Service components have ready access to the information in the deployment descriptors. Therefore, if you modify the JNDI names used by any of the WS-C or WS-T deployment descriptors, you may need to inform other JBoss Transaction Service components at run-time, by setting an appropriate property in the wstx.xml configuration file.

The Table 5.1, “Deployment descriptor values and properties” table shows the default JNDI names used by the deployment descriptors and the corresponding property to set if the default value is changed.