Brainstorm Transaction 2.0

This page is a collection of ideas for the Commons Transaction 2.0 version.

Is commons transaction usefull at all?

• file store is something used in a number of projects

• with the increasing number of processor cores per machine there is an increasing need for concurrent programming

• concurrent programming is still an art, not a science or solved field of engineering: people need support

General improvements over 1.x:

• Make code much cleaner and more obvious

• Cleanly define interfaces

• Use 5.0 features like generics and locks

• Use file channels

• Use commons logging

• Full file management capabilities for transactional file system

• Much improved transaction scheme

• Mimimize depdendencies

• Further reduction of deadlock likelyhood

Use cases for 2.0:

• Use the lock manager and hierarchical lock maanger for your own applications

  • Benefit from automatic deadlock recovery

  • Make sure your code is always interruptable

  • Let your code have a timer for a whole block of locks

  • Be sure you never forget to release a lock again

• Have transactional file access

• Have a framework to add transactionality to all kinds of resource managers

• Have a transactional map implementations

• Have a whole set of set of transactional implementations taking part of a single transaction

Current status of implementation:

• Most stuff implemented

• UndoManager needs serialization (To what? XML?) and is merely non-functional

• General missing steps:

  1. Make all parts of the code thread safe

  2. Add tests

  3. Add logging

  4. Add API docs

  5. Add high level docs

Links:

• Lots of links by Brian Goetz: http://www.briangoetz.com/pubs.html

• Deadlock detection using JMX in JDK 1.6: https://www.limewire.org/fisheye/browse/limecvs/gui/com/limegroup/gnutella/gui/DeadlockSupport.java?r=1.3

• Testing

  • http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp08226.html

  • http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-contest.html

• What Joshua Bloch thinks about API design: http://www.scribd.com/doc/33655/How-to-Design-a-Good-API-and-Why-it-Matters

• http://findbugs.cs.umd.edu