Once you get the XTS demo running on your local JBoss build, start to exercise *all* the different ways you can use XTS to do 1) Atomic Transactions (been around decades. 2 outcomes: commit/rollback) 2) Business Activty (been around less than a decade and introduces "compensate" as a 3rd possible transaction outcome) Atomic Transactions are very familiar and the XTS demo treats them exactly as you would expect. Drive the demo in "Atomic" mode and see how the XTS plumbing "calls back" the Taxi, Restaurant, and Theater participants to co-ordinate that they can all "commit" to a night on the town. Then ... try to "pull the plug" on one of the participants (e.g. maybe the Theater is sold-out) and XTS will roll-back the entire "night on the town" ... i.e. both your taxi transportation plans and dinner reservations will not be booked. Business Activity is a (relatively) new transaction standard. It was born out of Oasis BTP and evolved (down a long road) into the WS-BA standard. Drive the XTS demo in "Business Activity" mode, and you will be introduced to the "compensate" outcome potential ... which can give you a potentially much more flexible way of managin transactions than the "all or nothing" strictness of Atomic Transactions. Business Activity is a "relaxation" of the Atomic Transaction protocol, and XTS is the very best place to learn this hands on. You might be interested to attach via a remote debugger (i.e. Eclipse) to your JBoss XTS demo code and single-step through the exact APIs used by XTS to drive the demos. These kind of single-step sessions I find to be most informative re: learning XTS internals. If you are seriously interested to be a student of the history of how XTS supported standards evolved (i.e. why does XTS implement WS-AT and WS-BA?), you might want to study the literature of the causes and effects that motivated use transitions from OMG/OTS/CorbaIDL-API to JCP/JTS/JTA-API and onto WS-T/XTS/JSR-156-API. The history is relevant (IMHO). Also, if reading all these TX standards' white papers gets you a little too bogged down in verbage, take a break and visit a video presentation from this guy: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/mark-little-qcon08. (He had another video presentation on www.theserverside.com -- but I can't find that one anymore). Of course, continue to subscribe to this specific forum (and also JBoss Transactions User forum). These forums I find to be the best single possible places to learn about the state-of-the-art in transaction technology, and its implementation of same - JBossTS. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4259399#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...