Support for transactions is provided by the transaction service within WebSphere® Application Server. The way that applications use transactions depends on the type of application component.
A transaction is unit of activity, within which multiple updates to resources can be made atomic (as an indivisible unit of work) such that all or none of the updates are made permanent. For example, during the processing of an SQL COMMIT statement, the database manager atomically commits multiple SQL statements to a relational database. In this case, the transaction is contained entirely within the database manager and can be thought of as a resource manager local transaction (RMLT). In some contexts, a transaction is referred to as a logical unit of work (LUW). If a transaction involves multiple resource managers, for example multiple database managers, an external transaction manager is required to coordinate the individual resource managers. A transaction that spans multiple resource managers is referred to as a global transaction. WebSphere Application Server is a transaction manager that can coordinate global transactions, can be a participant in a received global transaction, and can also provide an environment in which resource manager local transactions can run.
WebSphere Application Server is a transaction manager that supports the coordination of resource managers through their XAResource interface, and participates in distributed global transactions with transaction managers that support the CORBA Object Transaction Service (OTS) protocol or Web Service Atomic Transaction (WS-AtomicTransaction) protocol. WebSphere Application Server also participates in transactions imported through Java EE Connector 1.5 resource adapters. You can also configure WebSphere applications to interact with databases, JMS queues, and JCA connectors through their local transaction support, when you do not require distributed transaction coordination.
Resource
managers that offer transaction
support can be categorized into those that support two-phase coordination
(by offering an XAResource interface) and those that support only
one-phase coordination (for example through a LocalTransaction interface).
The WebSphere Application Server transaction
support provides coordination, within a transaction, for any number
of two-phase capable resource managers. It also enables a single one-phase
capable resource manager to be used within a transaction in the absence
of any other resource managers, although a WebSphere transaction
is not necessary in this case.
The ActivitySession service provides an alternative unit-of-work (UOW) scope to that provided by global transaction contexts. It is a distributed context that can be used to coordinate multiple one-phase resource managers. The WebSphere EJB container and deployment tooling support ActivitySessions as an extension to the Java EE programming model. Enterprise beans can be deployed with lifecycles that are influenced by ActivitySession context, as an alternative to transaction context. An application can then interact with a resource manager for the period of a client-scoped ActivitySession, rather than only the duration of an EJB method, and have the resource manager local transaction outcome directed by the ActivitySession. For more information about ActivitySessions, see Using the ActivitySession service.