[jboss-dev-forums] [JBoss Transactions Development] - Asynchronicity and transaction context propagation

[chtimi2]

This question is more general than specifically about JBoss TM, but I thought the developers of JBoss TM might have an idea about it. It is about whether propagating the transaction context between different threads in asynchronous invocations is possible or not. It is hard to find specific information about this topic, some technologies say specifically that they don't implement it but they never say why.

To give some context i'm studying the integration of QoS (Quality of Service) into a component-model based framework. 
The components expose used and provided services, produced and consumed events, and used and provided parameters. They live inside a light container (the component manager) that manages their lifecycle and plugs the QoS into service/event/parameter invocations by AOP.
The QoS include transactional behaviour and asynchronicity (we already have implemented Asynchronous Method Invocation and Asynchronous Method Dispatch), so i have to see if they are "orthogonal" or if they restrict each other, both in current technologies and in what is theoretically possible (and if impossible why).

My question is: is there a fundamental, intrinsic incompatibility between asynchronicity and the propagation of the transaction context?
Even in the (relatively recent) EJB 3.1 spec, it is mentioned that for the new @Asynchronous methods, the transaction context will not be propagated from the caller to the callee (but they don't say why). 

But is it really an absolute impossibility? 
After all during a remote transactional invocation, the transaction context is propagated to a different thread (from the client thread to the server thread) by rmi , so the transaction context doesn't have to be strictly thread-local.
Of course the service that is invoked asynchronously would/might return before committing, but that is not always unacceptable (like caches replicate their changes asynchronously after a service call), and it wouldn't prevent it from sharing the same transaction context.

So if there is an impossibility it doesn't come from sharing the transactional context between threads but from asynchronicity. What do you think?


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