Feedback on Narayana Spring integration required

[gytis]

I’d like to let everybody know that we have started working on providing better Narayana project integration with Spring. As a result of that, we’re planning to implement extra features to make Spring Framework and Spring Boot integration as smooth as possible. Also update our documentation and quickstarts with examples on how to use Narayana with Spring.

We are looking forward to hearing from you guys what are your thoughts on this work as well as what are your expectations from Narayana project when it comes to using it with Spring.

You can follow this work on our issue tracker: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBTM-2605.

[tomjenkinson]

I definitely think we should include in our guides how to configure the server for JTS distributed transactions as we have had questions on that recently: JBossTS distributed without container JEE

[gytis]

Currently I'm thinking of the following additions:

1. Spring Boot starter
2. General quickstart (Amos is finishing it off)
3. Java configuration example in our blog
4. XML configuration example in our blog
5. Chapter in documentation to cover above things in one place

[marklittle]

Yes. Whether the documentation is only in the community docs for now, it needs to be present. More than a wiki, blog entry, forum posting or JIRA.

[marklittle]

This is a good start but as I said separately, we need official quickstarts and documentation updates to cover this. Blog entries aren't sufficient.

[gytis]

For sure documentation should have everything. But I've added blog posts too in case people are looking for information in different locations.

[gytis]

Spring Boot integration code for Atomikos and Bitronix is located in Spring Boot repo. I wanted to check, if everybody agrees with me contributing this code (once and if it's implemented) to that repo? I'm asking because it will be quite a bit of work, since at least Atomikos and Bitronix integration code is in 4 modules + documentation.

If not, I could try to keep the code in our repo, but that will complicate things in the future with maintenance.

[tomjenkinson]

I think we should try to contribute this upstream to the spring boot repo, similar to how our wildfly integration is stored in their repo. That being said if its not accepted we then would need to consider how best to store this in our repo (perhaps like how we do for the BlackTie/WF integration).

[tomjenkinson]

Looking into spring boot I think we might be able to use TransactionalDriver (narayana/ProvidedXADataSourceConnection.java at master · jbosstm/narayana · GitHub) for the datasource integration but it will need an XADataSource wrapper like the existing implementations (spring-boot/BitronixXADataSourceWrapper.java at master · spring-projects/spring-boot · GitHub).

[marklittle]

Agreed. We can refer to it in our docs, blog posts etc. but it does more good being contributed upstream to Spring Boot.

[marklittle]

I haven't looked at TransactionalDriver for years, but when I wrote it originally the aim was for simplicity and developer adoption. Since that's also an aim behind Spring Boot, it sounds like a good match. We need to strive for simplicity. Even if it means we are opinionated about configuration options etc. that's the way to go. 80% of developers should be happy with what we have and able to get up and running in seconds. For those who want to tweak parameters they can, but we should hide as much as possible when doing this integration.

[tomjenkinson]

One thing we will still need to do even if we can get TXdriver for the JDBC is add a new wrapper for their JMS XA integration by the look of it.

[gytis]

Just a quick update on Spring Boot integration. I have an initial implementation of integration for JTA and JDBC [1]. There is a sample app in the commit too. It works, but does not have any configuration yet. My plan is to add configuration once there is a JMS integration implemented.

For JMS integration we might have to add something similar to jdbc module in ArjunaJTA. I will review Atomikos and Bitronix code, but any suggestions would be great.

[1] [JBTM-2606][WIP] Initial Narayana JTA and JDBC integration · gytis/spring-boot@e2f5ecd · GitHub

[tomjenkinson]

A great start Gytis. Can you verify recovery manager is running and configured with the appropriate XAResources? Can you show an example of jbossts-properties.xml?

[tomjenkinson]

Can you provide a link to the Atomikos or BTM JMS integration (from the spring boot repo)? We can either try a transactionaldriver addition if we think its worth it to be able to use JMS in Narayana standalone or just provide a javax.jms.XAConnectionFactoryImple in spring boot that overrides the getXAConnection to do the enlist.