Best Practices to handle transactions in web applications

jjonas · **Joined:** Fri Jun 19, 2009 9:31 am **Posts:** 12

Hi everybody,
I'm new to hibernate. I'm developping a web application with apache tomcat 6 and I'm not sure about the best way to handle the database transactions in my application. Currently I'm opening a session and begin a transaction when I start processing a request and i'm closing the session when processing is finished.

Code:

   Session session = SessionFactoryUtil.getSessionFactory().getCurrentSession();
   session.beginTransaction();
   [...]
   session.close();

All my classes in the application access the current session like this

Code:

   Session session = SessionFactoryUtil.getSessionFactory().getCurrentSession();
   session.get( ... );
   [...]

Are there any best practices to handle transactions in web applications? Is it recommmendable to use openejb (and the annotations @TransactionAttribute) to handle the transactions?

Thanks in advance!

gauravcj · **Joined:** Mon Oct 27, 2008 2:43 am **Posts:** 7

This should help:
https://www.hibernate.org/43.html

jjonas · **Joined:** Fri Jun 19, 2009 9:31 am **Posts:** 12

Thanks a lot for your answer. I read the article and come to the conclusion, that my approach is the a viable option. So I will extract my session and transaction management into a filter as described in the howto.

Nevertheless I'm a bit confused about J2EE Server and my "tomcat solution" (tomcat's faq: "Tomcat is not a full J2EE server"). When or why should a use a j2ee server - I read about pluggin openejb into tomcat... Most likely there is not THE answer for my (stupid) question ;). But are there any clues to decide weather a "need" a j2ee server or not?
To simplify my question: Let's assume you should develop a web application like a online shop. Is it reasonable to use a j2ee server?

I come to the question because I read about the "@TransactionAttribute" annotation and that seems a very "intuitive" solution for handling and managing transactions but tomcat is not a j2ee server and therefore does not support this option.

gauravcj · **Joined:** Mon Oct 27, 2008 2:43 am **Posts:** 7

This forum may not be the best place to get an answer.
To simply answer this, for a small web application which may not have massive scaling requirements and does not use EJBs, clustering etc., Tomcat will do.