[gavin.king]

Yes, Seam assumes JTA. Of course I could go off and implement my whole own tx management layer on top of JDBC, that looks exactly like JTA, except isn't - just like everyone used to do (Hibernate, JPA, Spring, ...) but of course this is totally fucking nuts! You now have this horrible combinatorial problem of all these different fwks each having their own tx API, causing nightmarish integration problems when if they all would have just used what already exists and works just perfectly well, there would be no problem!

So at the moment I am refusing to contribute to making this problem worse, by not introducing my own tx abstraction. We use JTA, and thats it. You can use JBoss MC to get a lightweight JTA/JCA layer in any environment you like, just like the "jpa" and "hibernate2" examples do (type "ant deploy.tomcat"). But most environments (read everything except testng, junit and tomcat) already have JTA.

[pgrillo]

It all makes sense.

We just don't have that much experience configuring/using JTA or even JNDI for that matter.

The biggest reasons for that were simply
a) we never had a specific need and
b) wanted our apps to come quickly for our developers with minimum configuration requirements that may vary by environment (test or development).

However, Using these technologies is probably long overdue, so i'll probably try switching to JBoss as our development app server (instead of Tomcat), and figure something out for Junit.

thanks for the explanation.