Transactions and AIT/TOJ

Jonathan pointed me to a recent discussion on TSS concerning writing transactional resources for non-transactional objects. It expanded into the more general topic of how to write XAResources, which it topical at the moment within Red Hat. Anyway it got me thinking that many of these requests aren't necessarily for "How do I write an XAResource?" but more for "How do I make my data transactional?" These are two different questions: the former infers the latter, but the latter doesn't infer the former. Yes believe it or not but transactions existed before XA came on the scene.

So it got me thinking and I realised that what many of them they really want is something akin to what we did in the original Arjuna system. It didn't have a name back then, since it was the whole reason for doing the Arjuna research, but eventually it became known as Arjuna Integrated Transactions (AIT), or Transactional Objects for Java (TOJ). The use of "it" has not been pushed much (at all) over the past few years, which is a shame because I still think it's a great model. So it may be time to dust it off and bring it back into the light.