Chapter 1. An Introduction to the Java Transaction API (JTA)

Transactional standards provide extremely low-level interfaces for use by application programmers. Sun Microsystems has specified higher-level interfaces to assist in the development of distributed transactional applications. These interfaces are still low-level enough to require the programmer to be concerned with state management and concurrency for transactional application. They are most useful for applications which require XA resource integration capabilities, rather than the more general resources which the other APIs allow.
With reference to [JTA99], distributed transaction services typically involve a number of participants:
Application Server
Provides the infrastructure required to support an application run-time environment which includes transaction state management, such as an EJB server.
Transaction Manager
Provides the services and management functions required to support transaction demarcation, transactional resource management, synchronization, and transaction context propagation.
Resource Manager
(through a resource adapter[1]) Provides the application with access to resources. The resource manager participates in distributed transactions by implementing a transaction resource interface. The transaction manager uses this interface to communicate transaction association, transaction completion, and recovery.
Communication Resource Manager (CRM)
Supports transaction context propagation and access to the transaction service for incoming and outgoing requests.
From the transaction manager’s perspective, the actual implementation of the transaction services does not need to be exposed. High-level interfaces allow transaction interface users to drive transaction demarcation, resource enlistment, synchronization, and recovery processes. The JTA is a high-level application interface that allows a transactional application to demarcate transaction boundaries, and contains also contains a mapping of the X/Open XA protocol.

Note

The JTA support provided by JBossJTA is compliant with the JTA 1.0.1 specification.


[1] A Resource Adapter is used by an application server or client to connect to a Resource Manager. JDBC drivers which are used to connect to relational databases are examples of Resource Adapters.