Managing database transactions manually in a Spring/Hibernate environment

Question

We've got a Spring based web application that makes use of Hibernate to load/store its entities to the underlying database.

Since it's a backend application we not only want to allow our UI but also 3rd party tools to manually initiate DB transactions. That's why the callers need to

1. Call a StartTransaction method and in return get an ID that they can refer to
2. Do all DB relevant calls (e. g. creating, modifying, deleting) by referring to this ID to make clear which operations belong to the started transaction
3. Call the CommitTransaction method to signal to our backend that the transaction can be committed now (or in the negative case RollbackTransaction will be called)

So keeping in mind, that all database handling will be done internally by the Java persistence annotations, how can we open the transaction management to our UI that behaves like a 3rd party application that has no direct access to the backend entities but deals with data transfer objects only?

Answer 1

I think this can be done but would be a royal pain to implement/verify. You would basically require a transaction manager which is not bounded by "per-thread-transaction" definition but spans across multiple invocations for the same client.

JTA + Stateful session beans might be something you would want to have a look at.