Atomikos JTA provider as global transaction manager to coordinate GemFire/Geode cache transactions with JPA/JDBC and/or JMS resources.

Atomikos is light-weight (e.g. out-of-container), embeddable global transaction manager. Atomikos is JTA compliant and can be integrated with Gemfire/Geode to perform XA transaction across Geode, JPA/JDBC and JMS operations.

1. Add the following SpringBoot starters to your POM:

• spring-boot-starter-data-gemfire (or spring-data-geode)
• spring-boot-starter-data-jpa
• spring-boot-starter-jta-atomikos

2. Start an In-Memory JNDI provider (SimpleNamingContextBuilder) before the application context is initialized.
3. After the Application Context initialization (e.g. in @PostConstruct) bind the Atomikos UserTransaction manager to the JNDI using name: java:comp/UserTransaction

Now you can use Spring @Transaction annotations to start global (manged by Atomikos) transactions. If Gemfire operation (like put/get) is performed within such transaction it will atomatically participate in the global transaction.

Out of the box, Gemfire/Geode provides the following JTA Global Transactions integration options:

1. Have Gemfire/Geode act as JTA transaction manager - Mind that Gemfire JTA manager is not JTA compliant and could cause synchronization and transaction coordination problems. In its current state you better not use it as JTA manager!
2. Coordinate with an external JTA transaction manager in a container (such as WebLogic or JBoss). Also GemFire can be set as the "last resource" while using a container. - While this approach provides a reliable JTA capabilities it requires a heavey-weight JEE container.

The SpringBoot Atomikos integration extends option (2) by using Atomikos as an external JTA manager without the need of running a J2EE container.

At startup GemFire looks for a TransactionManager javax.transaction.TransactionManager that has been bound to its JNDI context. When GemFire finds such an external transaction manager, all GemFire region operations (such as get and put) will participate in global transactions hosted by this external JTA transaction manager: Coordinates with External JTA Transactions Managers

Because Gemfire/Gedoe require JNDI provider to lookup the global transactions we have build a simple (in-memory) JNDI provider: io.pivotal.poc.gemfire.gtx.jndi.SimpleNamingContextBuilder. Note: SimpleNamingContextBuilder re-uses the code from the spring-test project. If you know a more elgant way to create in-memory JNDI providers please let me know!

mvn clean install

mvn clean install -Pgeode

java -Dgemfire.name=server1 
     -Dgemfire.server.port=40405 
     -Dgemfire.jmx-manager-port=1199 
     -Dgemfire.jmx-manager=true 
     -Dgemfire.jmx-manager-start=true 
     -jar ./target/gemfire-jpa-atomikos2-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar