Spring is a great framework for dependency injection and it comes with a lot of support classes and utilities for all kind of things. Hibernate is a persistence service with a lot of useful features, that is relatively easy to use. Configuring both frameworks is not always easy. Configuring them together is sometimes hard and it is easy to make mistakes.

This blog addresses a problem in a configuration that is fairly common: use Spring for transaction management on top of a JTA provider and use Hibernate for persistence. Transaction demarcation is easy and declarative with Spring. The problem is that Hibernate sometimes needs to detect the current transaction and this needs to be configured. This leads to hard to detect bugs in applications that rely on auto flushing.
(more...)

Tags: auto flush, Hibernate, JTA, Spring
Filed under Hibernate, JTA, Spring | 4 Comments »

At a client we are now using files and datasources together. We want the write actions to the database and the files to be in one transaction. We want this because the files represent the database data for legacy applications. As there is no distributed transaction API for files which is JTA (Java Transaction API) compatible we had to find a solution to implement this. This post describes the (big) steps we did and the solution we found. Of course, you can skip the steps and go straight to the solution.
(more...)

Filed under Hibernate, JTA, Java, Testing | 2 Comments »