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Advantages of the Spring Framework’s Transaction Support Model
Traditionally, EE application developers have had two choices for transaction management: global or local transactions, both of which have profound limitations. Global and local transaction management is reviewed in the next two sections, followed by a discussion of how the Spring Framework’s transaction management support addresses the limitations of the global and local transaction models.
Global Transactions
Global transactions let you work with multiple transactional resources, typically
relational databases and message queues. The application server manages global
transactions through the JTA, which is a cumbersome API (partly due to its
exception model). Furthermore, a JTA UserTransaction normally needs to be sourced from
JNDI, meaning that you also need to use JNDI in order to use JTA. The use
of global transactions limits any potential reuse of application code, as JTA is
normally only available in an application server environment.
Previously, the preferred way to use global transactions was through EJB CMT (Container Managed Transaction). CMT is a form of declarative transaction management (as distinguished from programmatic transaction management). EJB CMT removes the need for transaction-related JNDI lookups, although the use of EJB itself necessitates the use of JNDI. It removes most but not all of the need to write Java code to control transactions. The significant downside is that CMT is tied to JTA and an application server environment. Also, it is only available if one chooses to implement business logic in EJBs (or at least behind a transactional EJB facade). The negatives of EJB in general are so great that this is not an attractive proposition, especially in the face of compelling alternatives for declarative transaction management.
Local Transactions
Local transactions are resource-specific, such as a transaction associated with a JDBC connection. Local transactions may be easier to use but have a significant disadvantage: They cannot work across multiple transactional resources. For example, code that manages transactions by using a JDBC connection cannot run within a global JTA transaction. Because the application server is not involved in transaction management, it cannot help ensure correctness across multiple resources. (It is worth noting that most applications use a single transaction resource.) Another downside is that local transactions are invasive to the programming model.
Spring Framework’s Consistent Programming Model
Spring resolves the disadvantages of global and local transactions. It lets application developers use a consistent programming model in any environment. You write your code once, and it can benefit from different transaction management strategies in different environments. The Spring Framework provides both declarative and programmatic transaction management. Most users prefer declarative transaction management, which we recommend in most cases.
With programmatic transaction management, developers work with the Spring Framework transaction abstraction, which can run over any underlying transaction infrastructure. With the preferred declarative model, developers typically write little or no code related to transaction management and, hence, do not depend on the Spring Framework transaction API or any other transaction API.