understanding JTA Spring and Bitronix

Question

I am trying to understand what is the difference between JTA, Spring and Bitronix?

What should I use for transactions in Hibernate persistence?

Answer 1

• JTA is an API for distributed transaction management. It can be implemented as part of application server or as a standalone transaction manager.

• Bitronix Transaction Manager is a standalone implementation of JTA.

• Spring is a framework that provides (among other features) unified interface for transaction management. In particular, Spring-managed transaction can use JTA implementation as a backend.

In other words, in a typical Spring and Hibernate application you manage transactions using Spring transaction support, and Spring is configured to use one of backend transaction managers:

• If you don't need distributed transactions use Hibernate's own transaction support (HibernateTransactionManager)
• If you need distributed transactions use JTA transactions (JtaTransactionManager). In particular:
  • On a full-blown application server JtaTransactionManager uses built-in JTA implementation
  • In standalone environment (such as Tomcat, etc) you need to configure standalone JTA implementation such as Bitronix.