Programmatic transaction management is usually a good idea only if you have a small
number of transactional operations. For example, if you have a web application that
requires transactions only for certain update operations, you may not want to set up
transactional proxies by using Spring or any other technology. In this case, using the
TransactionTemplate may be a good approach. Being able to set the transaction name
explicitly is also something that can be done only by using the programmatic approach
to transaction management.
On the other hand, if your application has numerous transactional operations, declarative transaction management is usually worthwhile. It keeps transaction management out of business logic and is not difficult to configure. When using the Spring Framework, rather than EJB CMT, the configuration cost of declarative transaction management is greatly reduced.