Regarding the comment on transactional versus non-transactional threads mentioned on https://issues.jboss.org/browse/ISPN-1137 - I think the fact that we allow this is a flaw.

The approach we are taking with JSR 107 is such:

1) If a cache is non-transactional, transactional threads accessing the cache throw an exception.

2) If a cache is transactional, threads must have an ongoing transaction.  If not, an exception is thrown, unless:

3) Auto-commit is configured to be true.  In this case, if a non-transactional thread accesses the cache, a tx is started, work done, and the tx auto-committed.