One of the most compelling reasons to use the Spring Framework is the comprehensive transaction support. The Spring Framework provides a consistent abstraction for transaction management that delivers the following benefits:



*Provides a consistent programming model across different transaction APIs such as JTA, JDBC, Hibernate, JPA, and JDO.



*Supports declarative transaction management.



*Provides a simpler API for programmatic transaction management than a number of complex transaction APIs such as JTA.



*Integrates very well with Spring's various data access abstractions.



This chapter is divided up into a number of sections, each detailing one of the value-adds or technologies of the Spring Framework's transaction support. The chapter closes up with some discussion of best practices surrounding transaction management (for example, choosing between declarative and programmatic transaction management).



*The first section, entitled Motivations, describes why one would want to use the Spring Framework's transaction abstraction as opposed to EJB CMT or driving transactions via a proprietary API such as Hibernate.



*The second section, entitled Key abstractions outlines the core classes in the Spring Framework's transaction support, as well as how to configure and obtain DataSource instances from a variety of sources.



*The third section, entitled Declarative transaction management, covers the Spring Framework's support for declarative transaction management.



*The fourth section, entitled Programmatic transaction management, covers the Spring Framework's support for programmatic (that is, explicitly coded) transaction management.