Question

I’m studying both of these approaches to include transactions in my Spring application. As for now, I prefer using annotations, as opposed to the tx namespace. The reason is that it sort of clears up the XML/complexity. But this is just my opinion.

I have not had a chance to see what current Spring practitioners use for transactions. Which one is now the preferred approach, and why?

In other words, what are the pros and cons of each approach that ultimately justify the use of one over the other?

Answer 1

I would prefer to use annotations for marking transactions, not because of the ease of configuration or because of concerns about purity of coupling to Spring, but rather because it is typically the case that the code inside the method cannot work correctly without a transaction in place: the annotation is indicating something functional about the implementation as opposed to the way in which the code is managed (which would belong to the Spring configuration file).