As my work of going down the list of JEE specs is hitting dwindling returns, I decided to give a shot to implementing the Jakarta Transactions spec. This one's a little spicy for a couple of reasons, one of which is that it's really a codified implementation of another spec, the X/Open XA standard, which is an old standard for transaction processing. As is often the case, "old" here also means "fiddly", but fortunately it's not too bad for this need. Another reason is that, unlike with a lot of the specs I've implemented, all of the existing implementations seem a bit too heavyweight for me to adapt. I may look around again later: I could have missed one, and eventually GlassFish's implementation may spin off. In the mean time, I wrote a from-scratch implementation for the XPages JEE project: it doesn't cover everything in the spec, and in particular doesn't support suspend/resume for transactions, but it'll work for normal cases in an NSF.

This is part one of a fourteen-part series describing our long journey in redefining the Domino platform and how to use it to meet the expectations of today's customers -- specifically new customers. Our focus is totally on what new customers are looking for, not what existing Domino customers expect.

For a little while, I've had a task open for me to investigate the Jakarta Concurrency and MP Context Propagation specs, and this weekend I decided to dive into that. While I've shelved the MicroProfile part for now, I was successful in implementing Concurrency, at least for the most part.

So you think you’ve found a bug. What next? Create a support ticket, right? Wrong! First off, let’s point out something critical in that first line - “you think you’ve found a bug”. You may be a consumer for the code you think you’ve found a bug in. But you’re also a committer to other code. How many times has someone raised a problem where the code is actually working correctly? How many times has someone raised a problem but given insufficient evidence to know what’s going on, resulting in the famous “works for me”? And how many times was it PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair)?