Peter Holditch

Over the past 16 months - has it really been that long?! - I have attempted to climb the peaks of how to design applications that use transactions, and dived into the depths of the earth, looking at obscure knowledge such as how clients can demarcate transactions, and grubby deta... (more)

I thought I would devote this month's column to a subject that appeared a while ago in the weblogic.developer.interest.transaction newsgroup on newsgroups.bea.com. As an opening comment, if you have never seen these newsgroups and you are a WebLogic developer, then go find them i... (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 ... (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 obtai... (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... (more)

Picnicking during my summer holidays with my family, I was a little peeved to find that we had set up camp near an ant hill and some of them had decided to help themselves to elements of our lunch. Just as well, really, that I prefer sausage rolls and pork pies to chocolate buns,... (more)

Why are application servers so boring? I guess the answer to this question depends on your perspective. One man's boring commodity is another man's lifeblood. That observation alone would make for a rather short column, so we need another question... Who are these men, anyway? A... (more)

As I may have mentioned once or twice in this column over the foregoing months, developers can derive a large amount of value from building their applications on an application server. Services accessed by standard APIs, such as transaction services provided through JTA and the s... (more)

For several months now I've waxed lyrical about transactions and how they hide the complexities of distributed updates in applications, and indeed the concept of the two-phase commit transaction is a very powerful one, allowing you to make the assumption that all the transactiona... (more)

I've seen several posts in the public WebLogic server transactions newsgroup in which people have had problems with transactions spread across multiple servers. The gist of these problems is always that they have two EJB components in two different servers. Bean One on Server On... (more)

That was what an old girlfriend periodically said to me. Needless to say, we're no longer together - I wasn't keen on the comparison. "Shall I compare thee to a dog?" is rather less poetic than I like. But in thinking about this month's transaction column, the comment seemed stra... (more)

As we've discussed over the past few issues, JTA-style transactions provide a way for multiple data updates to be tied together so application logic can operate safely in the assumption that it will succeed or fail consistently, even in the face of technical failures along the ro... (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 Christoph... (more)

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 Hunge... (more)

Since this will be a monthly column on the subject of transactions, which from my experience seems to be a subject that everybody has heard of, but nobody is familiar with, I thought I would build up speed with a back-to-basics look at transactions, what they are and what they're... (more)