5.5. J2EE Usage Models

J2EE provides three ways to manage transactions for beans:

In any of these cases, transactions may be either local or XA transactions, depending on how the code and descriptors are written. Some kinds of beans (stateful session beans and entity beans) are not required by the spec to support non-transactional sources, although the spec does allow an application server to optionally support this with the caution that this is not portable or predictable. Generally speaking, to support most typical EJB activities in a portable fashion requires some kind of transaction support.