What's New in JCA 1.5 

Additional Contracts

In addition to the system contracts from the previous version (connection management, transaction management and security), the resource adapters now implement two other contracts:

●      Lifecycle

●      Work management

The lifecycle contract is closely related to the tight integration of the resource adapter development in the new specification to the concept of JavaBeans. The implementation of a resource adapter is required to be a JavaBean that can be started and stopped by the application server on which it is deployed.

The work management contract enables the resource adapter to start Java threads to do its work. The resource adapter, however, is not required to implement thread management logic. The threads are executed by the application server according to its specific thread management implementation.

Inbound Communication

Another important capability of the resource adapters developed in accordance with JCA 1.5 is the inbound communication. While in the 1.0 version of the specification the resource adapters were only enabled to provide the applications with a connection to an underlying EIS, in 1.5 the EIS itself can send messages to the application server using the resource adapter. The message inflow also involves the concept of endpoints where the messages are sent. The consumers of the messages are listeners registered to the endpoints. In a typical scenario this communication would involve a message-driven enterprise bean that acts as a message listener.

The inbound communication also changes the transaction management since it enables transaction inflow from the EIS. The AS Java processes the propagated transactions.