Benefits of using Springs Transaction management vs using hibernate

Question

I've been trying to learn spring and hibernate, and I've used a lot of examples around the net to put together a nice application. However, I realized now that Spring supports transaction management. In my spring app I just simply made whatever calls I wanted to, directly to hibernate. Is there a reason/benefit as to why people would use Spring's transaction management/db stuff?

Answer 1

The real advantages are:

• Lightweight declarative syntax. Compare:

  public void saveEmployee(Employee e) {
      Session s = sf.getCurrentSession();    
      s.getTransaction().begin();
      s.save(e);    
      s.getTransaction().commit();
  }
  

  and

  @Transactional
  public void saveEmployee(Employee e) {
      sf.getCurrentSession().save(e);
  }
  

• Flexible transaction propagation. Imagine that now you need to execute this saveEmployee() method as a part of a complex transaction. With manual transaction management, you need to change the method since transaction management is hard-coded. With Spring, transaction propagation works smoothly:

  @Transactional
  public void hireEmployee(Employee e) {
      dao.saveEmployee(e);
      doOtherStuffInTheSameTransaction(e);
  }
  

• Automatic rollback in the case of exceptions