Transaction Management

by Tony Ng

Transaction management is a mechanism for simplifying the development of distributed multiuser enterprise applications. It is also one of the standard services offered by the J2EE platform. By enforcing strict rules on an application's ability to access and update data, transaction management ensures data integrity. A transactional system ensures that a unit of work either fully completes or has no effect at all. Transaction management frees an application programmer from dealing with the complex issues of data access, including synchronized updates, failure recovery, and multiuser programming.

This chapter begins with a general overview of transactional concepts and J2EE platform support for transaction management. Then it describes the Java^TM Transaction API (JTA), the interface used by the J2EE platform to manage and coordinate transactions. Finally, the chapter describes the transactional models available to each type of J2EE component and to enterprise information systems.