An investigation of the transactional scope of a persistence context

Abstract

Transactions are used in almost every application in every industry today whether it’s ecommerce, telecommunications, cloud computing etc. Java Enterprise Applications (JEAs), built using J2EE and or newer JEE technology provide an n-tiered distributed environment which are widely used in the industry. In order to exploit enhanced technology features, it is common for organisations to routinely update their existing applications. Then aim for system architects is to gain new features while maintaining backwards compatibility. This work illustrates a number of backward compatibility issues in the Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) architecture. In particular it highlights that a transactional scope problem of a persistence context can occur in a complex transaction pattern when using the new EJB3.x technology. This interoperability issue occurs when migrating applications from EJB2.x to EJB3.x. The issue occurs when the transactional context spans multiple JEE application servers. An experimental evaluation highlights that EJB3.x is not completely backwards compatible. A corrective system architecture is developed and evaluated as part of this work.