5
Transaction Handling

This chapter covers transaction management for both CORBA and EJB applications. Transaction handling in the two distributed component development models has some fundamental similarities, but there are also some differences. For example, the application developer who is using EJBs can elect to have the EJB container manage all transactions in a way that is transparent to the client application and to the bean developer. The developer does not have to write any transaction code at all--the transactional properties of the application can be declared at bean deployment time. In this sense, EJBs are said to have declarative transactional capability.

The CORBA developer, on the other hand, must use the transactional APIs provided--usually a mapping of a subset of the OMG Object Transaction Service (OTS) API, such as the Java Transaction Service (JTS) that is supplied with Oracle8i JServer. The CORBA developer must code calls to a transaction service to enable transactional properties for distributed objects, where this is required.

But the EJB developer might require finer-grained control of the application's transactional properties than that offered by the declarative transactional capabilities built-in to the EJB container. In this case, the developer can use explicit calls to transaction API methods, either on the client side or in the bean implementations themselves.

This chapter discusses the following topics:

• Transaction Overview

• Transaction Service Interfaces

• CORBA Examples

• Transaction Management for EJBs

• EJB Transaction Examples

• For More Information

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