The Java EE 5 Tutorial

JTA Transactions

JTA is the abbreviation for the Java Transaction API. This API allows you to demarcate transactions in a manner that is independent of the transaction manager implementation. The Application Server implements the transaction manager with the Java Transaction Service (JTS). But your code doesn’t call the JTS methods directly. Instead, it invokes the JTA methods, which then call the lower-level JTS routines.

A JTA transaction is controlled by the Java EE transaction manager. You may want to use a JTA transaction because it can span updates to multiple databases from different vendors. A particular DBMS’s transaction manager may not work with heterogeneous databases. However, the Java EE transaction manager does have one limitation: it does not support nested transactions. In other words, it cannot start a transaction for an instance until the preceding transaction has ended.

To demarcate a JTA transaction, you invoke the begin, commit, and rollback methods of the javax.transaction.UserTransaction interface.