Book Review : Java Transactions Design Strategies

About the author

I came across this book by Mark Richards- Java Transaction Design Strategies. For those who are not from Boston area- mark is a much familiar face in the NEJUG meetings- ever second Thursday. He served as the President for quite some time.

The book:

The book is about Transactions- in java applications- using EJB or Spring

Mark has done a good job of drawing a distinction between Transaction Models vs Transaction Strategies. Transaction Model is how you declare your transactions. Transaction strategy on the other hand is putting together a strategy on where to put transactions and who is responsible for what.

Throughout the book- he draw examples and contrasts Spring and EJB.

Code examples are minimal- its more of easy to read and grasp language. I personally do not like books with lots of code- so this went well with me. This book has been deliberately written in a concise manner – which it makes it easy to read and finish

The book is divided in two parts. The first part introduces the three Transaction Models- Local Transaction Model, Programmatic Model, Declarative Model. It also provides a recap of common transaction related terms- JTA ,JTS, ACID, Isolation levels,XA transactions, Two phase commit,Heuristic Transactions, LPS

Second Part discusses three design patterns- Client Owner Transaction Design pattern, Domain Service Owner Transaction Design Pattern,Server Delegate Owner Transaction Design Pattern.

Best Practices suggested in this book:

In declarative transactions: Make the class level transaction- most restrictive , and then fine tune for individual methods as needed

The method that starts the transaction- should be the one to commit or rollback

If a method requires a transaction context – but is not responsible for  marking it as rollback- then it should have an attribute of  Mandatory

Use XA only of you have multiple resources participating – in tech same transaction context

I enjoyed reading the book and would recommend to anyone- seeking a quick and clean introduction to Transactions with a touch of Java and Spring

You can get the book from here
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