JEE7: Do EJB and CDI beans support container-managed transactions?

Question

Java EE7 consists of a bunch of \"bean\" definitions:

• Managed Beans 1.0 (JSR-316 / JSR-250)
• Dependency Injection for Java 1.0 (JSR-330)
• CDI 1

Answer 1

Until Java EE 7 only EJB was transactional and the @Transactional annotation didn't exist.

Since Java EE 7 and JTA 1.2 you can use transactional interceptor in CDI with @Transactional annotation.

To answer your question about the best type of bean to use, the answer is CDI by default.

CDI beans are lighter than EJB and support a lot of feature (including being an EJB) and is activated by default (when you add beans.xml file to your app). Since Java EE 6 @Inject supersede @EJB. Even if you use remote EJBs (feature not existing in CDI) the best practice suggest that you @EJB once to inject remote EJB and a CDI producer to expose it as a CDI bean

public class Resources {

    @EJB
    @Produces
    MyRemoteEJB ejb;

}

The same is suggested for Java EE resources

public class Resources2 {

    @PersistenceContext
    @Produces
    EntityManager em;

}

These producers will be used later

public class MyBean {

    @Inject
    MyRemoteEJB bean;

    @Inject
    EntityManager em;

}

EJB continue to make sense for certain services they include like JMS or Asynchronous treatment, but you'll use them as CDI bean.