Question

We (will) have the following architecture:

• Base.war will be a self-contained spring-hibernate application
• All applications will run under Glassfish, and may be clustered
• E1.war will sit on top of Base.war, extending it’s functionality
• There could be further extensions (E2.war, E3.war, …) sitting on top of Base.war
• Either wars could start a transaction, and transactions could span between wars
• Without shutting down Base.war, or any other Ex.war, it should be possible to upgrade an Ey.war

Is there a solution for this with spring-hibernate-glassfish environment?

Answer 1

Questions to ask yourself/team:

1. Does our database support XA?
2. Does the JDBC driver support XA?
3. Will the combination of Glassfish/database/JDBC work with XA?
4. Do we really need distributed transactions?

I’ll return to point 4 – don’t do distributed transactions. You need to be really sure that distributed transactions are the best solution for you. It isn’t simple and the recommendation is to avoid them, if possible. This comes straight from Jürgen Höller, co-founder and senior developer at Spring.

Spring has no support for propagating transactions between processes, so you’ll need the container to support this or manually do this yourself.