Hi,
I am trying to use JTA transactions with JPA / Hibernate without using an EJB server and to run in Tomcat.

In theory, I think this is possible, I should be able to use the JBossTS to provide JTA transactions. But, I am just wondering how would the EntityManager get associated with the JTA Transaction if I am not using dependency injection for EntityManager or the Transaction i.e. there is no App Server to make the connection?

Kind Regards

This might not be the best answer you can get but here are my two cents. You will need to demarcate your calls to where it involves calls to EntityManager, possibly with UserTransaction, and you will have to configure your hibernate entity manager to lookup a transaction manager (through JNDI?) and the rest is transparent (provided your connection pool is also aware of the transaction manager).

Just checking the documentation on this one.
In JPA you can specify in the persietence which JTA datasource the persistence unit should use. However, I can't find anywhere which states where you tell the JPA vendor which JNDI service to look up.

In the Manning book, (circa pages 96, 97, 98) it gives details for where to set the JTA datasource for a hibernate session, however again I can't see where you would tell the JPA vendor which JNDI to look up.

So I can't see anyway of doing this outside an AppServer?

Any ideas or links to wikis greatly appreciated?

I don't have it on top of my head right now but I remember there was something like vendor specific properties in JPA. Check if you can set any hibernate properties that has something to do with transaction management. Something like: hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class