Maros Cunderlik

Introduction With ever increasing software complexity, error handling mechanisms offered by programming languages become more and more important. Traditional error handling techniques such as using global variables to indicate an error (errno in C), returning a value that represents an error or simply terminating the program resulted in difficult to read and error-prone code. The alternative to these techniques was introduced in C++. The exception mechanism offered an elegant error handling technique that quickly became the primary tool for dealing with errors in OO languages. The concept of exception handling is based on separating error processing from the rest of the code and redirecting the flow of control to the exception block should an error occur. Given the ability to "catch", "throw" and propagate the exception, developers have a powerful tool to create robu... (more)

Interfacing Transaction Services: Part 2

Undoubtedly, the support for distributed transactions is a part of any enterprise system. Part One of this series (JDJ, March 1998) explored the X/Open Distributed Transaction Processing (DTP) Model - a common model for distributed transaction processing. We also explained the concepts of Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) that quickly become de facto standard for developing business components on the Windows platform. We demonstrated how to write "first-class" MTS COM components in Java. The described process of creating these components has been greatly simplified by the releas... (more)

Interfacing Transaction Services

Introduction With wider acceptance of component development and distributed object technologies, applications can be 'assembled' as a set of collaborating components. For non-visual business components, where delivery time, integration costs and maintainability are the determining factors of success, Java is increasingly the implementation language of choice. When writing components in Java, we must be able to access a set of services commonly provided to business objects in enterprise computing, most notably resource management, object pooling and transaction processing. In thi... (more)