Comparing the Transactional annotation in Spring vs. Seam

[asookazian]

http://docs.jboss.org/seam/2.1.2/api/org/jboss/seam/annotations/Transactional.html

http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/api/org/springframework/transaction/annotation/Transactional.html

I was reading the very well-written Spring in Action (yes, I'm a big Manning fan) last night and noticed some major advantages/improvements in the @org.springframework.transaction.annotation.Transactional annotation vs. @org.jboss.seam.annotations.Transactional annotation.

1) Spring has seven propagation types (even nested).  Seam has four.

2) Spring has a total of eight optional attributes whereas Seam has one.  A couple of interesting/useful ones are timeout and isolation.

So are there any plans to make this annotation and general tx support for JavaBean components more robust in Seam 3?  The Spring framework's tx API is much more robust than Seam's but obviously there is typically a big push to use EJB 3 components (CMT/BMT) with Seam apps (in this case EARs) but what if you don't want to use EJBs and your project (WAR) does not require use of JMS/MDBs?

You're left with an anemic tx API in Seam 2.x...

[pragun1]

Indeed.

It is said that use Spring is you need Application level control over Container. It provides these features to avoid use of heavy Application Server Container and thats the reason why it became so popular.

Seam is a best glue F/W for JEE Stacks JSF-EJB-JPA with few more excellent advantages like JBPM-Drools etc. but Seam relies on the Application Server Container.

[asookazian]

It's recommended to use Seam with EE 5 certified app server like JBoss but it's not mandatory, you can run Seam apps in Tomcat.