As my work of going down the list of JEE specs is hitting dwindling returns, I decided to give a shot to implementing the Jakarta Transactions spec.

Implementation Oddities

This one's a little spicy for a couple of reasons, one of which is that it's really a codified implementation of another spec, the X/Open XA standard, which is an old standard for transaction processing. As is often the case, "old" here also means "fiddly", but fortunately it's not too bad for this need.

Another reason is that, unlike with a lot of the specs I've implemented, all of the existing implementations seem a bit too heavyweight for me to adapt. I may look around again later: I could have missed one, and eventually GlassFish's implementation may spin off. In the mean time, I wrote a from-scratch implementation for the XPages JEE project: it doesn't cover everything in the spec, and in particular doesn't support suspend/resume for transactions, but it'll work for normal cases in an NSF.

The Spec In Use

Fortunately, while implementations are generally complex (as befits the problem space), the actual spec is delightfully simple for users. There are two main things for an app developer to know about: the jakarta.transaction.UserTransaction interface and the @jakarta.transaction.Transactional annotation. These can be used separately or combined to add transactional behavior. For example:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10

@Transactional
public void createExampleDocAndPerson() {
	Person person = new Person();
	/* do some business logic */
	person = personRepository.save(person);
	
	ExampleDoc exampleDoc = new ExampleDoc();
	/* do some business logic */
	exampleDoc = repository.save(exampleDoc);
}

The @Transactional annotation here means that the intent is that everything in this method either completes or none of it does. If something to do with ExampleDoc fails, then the creation of the Person doc shouldn't take effect, even though code was already executed to create and save it.

You can also use UserTransaction directly:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19

@Inject
private UserTransaction transaction;

public void createExampleDocAndPerson() throws Exception {
	transaction.begin();
	try {
		Person person = new Person();
		/* do some business logic */
		person = personRepository.save(person);
	
		ExampleDoc exampleDoc = new ExampleDoc();
		/* do some business logic */
		exampleDoc = repository.save(exampleDoc);

		transaction.commit();
	} catch(Exception e) {
		transaction.rollback();
	}
}

There's no realistic way to implement this in a general way, so the way the Transactions API takes shape is that specific resources - databases, namely - can opt in to transaction processing. While this won't necessarily save you from, say, sending out an errant email, it can make sure that related records are only ever updated together.

Domino Implementation

This support is fairly common among SQL databases and other established resources, and, fortunately for us, Domino's transaction support became official in 12.0.

So I modified the JNoSQL driver to hook into transactions when appropriate. When it's able to find an open transaction, it begins a native Domino transaction and then registers itself as a javax.transaction.xa.XAResource (a standard Java SE interface) to either commit or roll back that DB transaction as appropriate.

From what I can tell, Domino's transaction support is a bit limited compared to what the spec can do. Apparently, Domino's support is based around thread-specific stacks - while this has the nice attribute of supporting nested transactions, it doesn't look to support suspending transactions or propagating them across threads.

Fortunately, the normal case will likely not need those more-arcane capabilities. Considering that few if any Domino applications currently make use of transactions at all, this should be a significant boost.

Next Steps

As I mentioned above, I'll likely take another look around for svelte implementations of the spec, since I'd be more than happy to cast my partial implementation to the wayside. While my version seems to check out in practice, I'd much sooner rely on a proven implementation from elsewhere.

Beyond that, any next steps may come in the form of supporting other databases via JPA. While JDBC drivers may hook into this as it is, I haven't tried that, and this could be a good impetus to adding JPA to the supported stack. That'll come post-2.7.0, though - this release has enough big-ticket items and should now be in a cool-off period before I call it solid and move to the next one.