JEE7: Do EJB and CDI beans support container-managed transactions?

Question

Java EE7 consists of a bunch of "bean" definitions:

• Managed Beans 1.0 (JSR-316 / JSR-250)
• Dependency Injection for Java 1.0 (JSR-330)
• CDI 1.1 (JSR-346)
• JSF Managed Beans 2.2 (JSR-344)
• EJB 3.2 (JSR-345)

In order to get rid of the chaos in my mind, I studies several articles of "when to use which bean type". One of the pros for EJB seems to be that they alone support declarative container-managed transactions (the famous transaction annotations). I'm not sure, though, if this is correct. Can anyone approve this?

Meanwhile, I came up with a simple demo application to check if this was actually true. I just defined a CDI bean (not an EJB - it has no class level annotations) as follows, based on this snippet:

public class CdiBean {
    @Resource
    TransactionSynchronizationRegistry tsr;

    @Transactional(Transactional.TxType.REQUIRED)
    public boolean isTransactional() {
        return tsr.getTransactionStatus() == Status.STATUS_ACTIVE;
    }
}

Now, the outcome on GlassFish 4.0 is that this method actually returns true, which, according to my inquiries, is not working as expected. I did expect the container to ignore the @Transactional annotation on a CDI bean method, or to even throw an exception. I use a freshly-installed GlassFish 4 server, so there are no interferences.

So my question is really:

• Which bean types do actually support container-managed transactions?
• Just for the sake of curiosity, how could I test it with a simple demo application if the code above is wrong?

(BTW: Someone described a similar problem here, but its solution does not apply to my case.

Answer 1

Until Java EE 7 only EJB was transactional and the @Transactional annotation didn't exist.

Since Java EE 7 and JTA 1.2 you can use transactional interceptor in CDI with @Transactional annotation.

To answer your question about the best type of bean to use, the answer is CDI by default.

CDI beans are lighter than EJB and support a lot of feature (including being an EJB) and is activated by default (when you add beans.xml file to your app). Since Java EE 6 @Inject supersede @EJB. Even if you use remote EJBs (feature not existing in CDI) the best practice suggest that you @EJB once to inject remote EJB and a CDI producer to expose it as a CDI bean

public class Resources {

    @EJB
    @Produces
    MyRemoteEJB ejb;

}

The same is suggested for Java EE resources

public class Resources2 {

    @PersistenceContext
    @Produces
    EntityManager em;

}

These producers will be used later

public class MyBean {

    @Inject
    MyRemoteEJB bean;

    @Inject
    EntityManager em;

}

EJB continue to make sense for certain services they include like JMS or Asynchronous treatment, but you'll use them as CDI bean.