Distributed Transactions

The JMS specification also supports distributed transactions. That is, the production and consumption of messages can be part of a larger, distributed transaction that includes operations involving other resource managers, such as database systems. A distributed transaction manager, like the one supplied by GlassFish Server, must be available to support distributed transactions.

In distributed transactions, the distributed transaction manager tracks and manages operations performed by multiple resource managers (such as a message service and a database manager) using a two-phase commit protocol defined in the Java Transaction API (JTA), XA Resource API Specification. In the Java world, interaction between resource managers and a distributed transaction manager are described in the JTA specification.

Support for distributed transactions means that messaging clients can participate in distributed transactions through the XAResource interface defined by JTA. This interface defines a number of methods used in implementing two-phase commit. While the API calls are made on the client side, the JMS message service tracks the various send and receive operations within the distributed transaction, tracks the transactional state, and completes the messaging operations only in coordination with a distributed transaction manager—provided by a Java Transaction Service (JTS). As with local transactions, the client can handle exceptions by ignoring them, retrying operations, or rolling back an entire distributed transaction.

Message Queue supports distributed transactions only when it is used as a JMS provider in a Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server. For additional information on how to use distributed transactions, please consult the Java EE documentation furnished by your application server provider.