Declarative or Programmatic Transaction in Spring

Question

What type of transaction management strategy we should use in Spring? Declarative or Programmatic? Which one is better and under what situation one should use it? Can you give any proper examples or tutorial about it.

Also want to know that what is the latest things we should use while write database codes in spring? What is the alternative for HibernateTemplate?

Answer 1

Programmatic Transaction Management

1. Allows us to manage transactions through programming in our source code.
2. This means hardcoding transaction logic between our business logic.
3. We use programming to manage transactions
4. Flexible, but difficult to maintain with large amount of business logic. Introduces boilerplate between business logic.
5. Preferred when relative less transaction logic is to be introduced.

Declarative Transaction Management

1. Allows us to manage transactions through configuration.
2. This means separating transaction logic with business logic.
3. We use annotations (Or XML files) to manage transactions.
4. Easy to maintain. Boilerplate is kept away from business logic.
5. Preferred when working with large amount of Transaction logic.

Answer 2

They are not mutually exclusive.

You can use decalrative transaction management (@Transactional) in most of cases, and fall back to programmatic transaction management (TransactionTemplate) when you face limitations of Spring AOP (see 11.5.1 Understanding the Spring Framework's declarative transaction implementation) or need to control transactions in more complex ways.