The introduction of inbound transactions in the Java Connector Architecture (JCA) 1.5 specification is a great step toward seamless integration of heterogeneous systems. In "Importing Java Transactions from an External EIS Using JCA 1.5 Transaction Inflow," Madhusudhan Konda explains the simple theory behind the transaction inflow contract and shows how easy it is to implement a resource adapter to import a transaction from an external enterprise.

Are you using JCA explicitly in your applications or design, apart from JDBC? What uses have you found?

Connecting to legacy applications in a transactional environment is the power of JCA. But I came acroos JCA when I needed to provide access to a filesystem from a clustered enterprise application. By that time it was a common error to use java.io from EJBs. JCA can also be used to all kinds of external services that provide data exchage somehow.

We use JCA 1.5 (Inflow) for connecting to non-JDBC data sources in a cable provisioning system. It has been terrific on JBoss 4.X and has been relatively straaight forward to implement the transactional inflow contract.

Thanks
Ray

We use JCA 1.5 (Inflow) for connecting to non-JDBC data sources in a cable provisioning system. It has been terrific on JBoss 4.X and has been relatively straaight forward to implement the transactional inflow contract.

Very nice! Is Transaction Inflow support built in to JBoss 4?

What TM are you using? Any gotchas? Any hiccups?

I'd love to see more information on how you're using it. Are you allowed to share more information?

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol Coherence: Clustered Shared Memory for Java

Since the completion model requires an interposed coordinator, don't you need a logging transaction manager available to the application server?

The introduction of inbound transactions in the Java Connector Architecture (JCA) 1.5 specification is a great step ..

It amazes me that this news item gets less attention than "what to name the JDK that comes after the JDK that comes after the JDK that comes after 1.5?"

Maybe it's the cryptic name: "Transaction Inflow".

Here's the English version: For the first time, there is a standard and seamless way for a Java application to provide itself to the rest of the world as a transactional Resource Manager (RM), meaning that whatever work is being done transactionally within the Java application (or further down the line, like when the Java application uses JDBC or an MQ product) can all be included in one master transaction that is controlled outside of the Java application, e.g. by a Transaction Monitor.

Very cool. This really solidifies Java in the enterprise space, and is long overdue.

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol Coherence: Clustered Shared Memory for Java

Agreed - for what I do, I almost never write web applications and pretty much center only on EAI - this has been one of the most significant additions to the J2EE space since sliced bread.

Thanks
Ray

Nice article.

Mark.