A transaction always ends when the Java Card RE regains programmatic control upon return from the applet's select, deselect, process, uninstall, or install methods. This is true whether a transaction ends normally, with an applet's call to commitTransaction, or with an abortion of the transaction (either programmatically by the applet, or by default by the Java Card RE). For more details on transaction abortion, refer to Section 7.6, Aborting a Transaction.

Transaction duration is the life of a transaction between the call to JCSystem.beginTransaction and either a call to commitTransaction or an abortion of the transaction.