Chapter 1. An Introduction to the Java Transaction API (JTA)

Transactional standards provide extremely low-level interfaces for use by application programmers. Sun Microsystems has specified higher-level interfaces to assist in the development of distributed transactional applications. These interfaces are still low-level enough to require the programmer to be concerned with state management and concurrency for transactional application. They are most useful for applications which require XA resource integration capabilities, rather than the more general resources which the other APIs allow.

With reference to [JTA99], distributed transaction services typically involve a number of participants:

From the transaction manager’s perspective, the actual implementation of the transaction services does not need to be exposed. High-level interfaces allow transaction interface users to drive transaction demarcation, resource enlistment, synchronization, and recovery processes. The JTA is a high-level application interface that allows a transactional application to demarcate transaction boundaries, and contains also contains a mapping of the X/Open XA protocol.