Chapter 14: Transaction Management

Overview

The notion of a transaction is fundamental to business systems architectures. A transaction, simply put, ensures that only agreed-upon, consistent, and acceptable state changes are made to a system—regardless of system failure or concurrent access to the system's resources.

With the advent of Web service architectures, distributed applications (macro-services) are being built by assembling existing, smaller services (microservices). The microservices are usually built with no a priori knowledge of how they may be combined. The resulting complex architectures introduce new challenges to existing transaction models. Several new standards are being proposed that specify how application servers and transaction managers implement new transaction models that accommodate the introduced complexities.

The first sections of this chapter introduce the fundamental concepts behind transactions and explain how transactions are managed within the current Java/J2EE platforms. Later sections discuss the challenges of using existing transaction models for Web services, explain newly proposed models and standards for Web service transactions, and finally, detail proposed implementations of these new models on the Java platform.