Sad, I mused - you don't often see that any more. My mind then wandered to
hoping that, as technologists, we aren't somehow tacitly colluding in the
erosion of the fabric that holds society together. Hmm, I seem to have come
over all melancholy. Excuse me whilst I visit The Hunger Site...
Understanding JTA
That's better. Anyhow, I digress. I promised to look this month at when to
use transactions and when not to. There's no better place to start than by
examining where the transaction specification (JTA) fits into the whole J2EE
jigsaw.
At a high level, all J2EE specifications fall into two broad categories:
those providing a point technology and those providing a layer that binds a
discrete set of specifications into the unified platform that J2EE defines.
By way of il... (more)
The waves of IT, as they are often called to, are marked out reasonably
accurately by languages. Starting almost at the beginning, take COBOL. With
its love of uppercase characters, and overly restrictive attitude to what
column the uppercase characters appear in - not to mention its extraordinary
zeal for the full stop - COBOL has always struck me as a language for
programmers to use to... (more)
This month, I thought I would take a below-the-surface look at what needs to
be done to achieve transactional access to the IBM MQSeries messaging product
from WebLogic Server within the context of an Xa transaction managed by
WebLogic's JTA subsystem. Of course, from the outset I would like to note
that WebLogic Server itself boasts a very capable and reliable messaging
system - which i... (more)
As I understand Western ideas about the world, there seem to have been three
distinct phases through which they have passed. In the beginning, people
believed that the world was flat, and at the center of the universe.
Eventually, this view was confounded by the likes of Christopher Columbus
discovering the New World while singularly failing to sail off the edge, as
many were convinced he... (more)
A common complaint in the transaction newsgroup is, "I've done my database
updates in a JTA transaction, but they didn't complete as a unit!"
In many cases, the explanation for this unfortunate loss of ACID is that the
database connections that were used in the logic weren't obtained from a
transactional data source, or Tx Data Source as it's abbreviated in the
console. The shorthand expl... (more)