experiences with autocommit functionality in 7.3

I was spending some time investigating how to fix the jdbc driver to 
deal with the autocommit functionality in 7.3. I am trying to come up 
with a way of using 'set autocommit = on/off' as a way of implementing 
the jdbc symantics for autocommit.  The current code just inserts a 
'begin' after every commit or rollback when autocommit is turned off in 
jdbc.

I can continue to use the old way and just issue a 'set autocommit = on' 
at connection initialization, but I wanted to investigate if using 'set 
autocommit = off' would be a better implementation.

The problem I am having is finding a way to turn autocommit on or off 
without generating warning messages, or without having the change 
accidentally rolled back later.

Below is the current behavior (based on a fresh pull from cvs this morning):

Key:  ACon = autocommit on      ACoff = autocommit off      NIT = not in transaction      IT = in transaction      IT*
=in transaction where a rollback will change autocommit state
 

Current State               Action            End State
ACon and NIT                set ACon          ACon and NIT                            set ACoff         ACoff and IT*
ACon and IT                 set ACon          ACon and IT                            set ACoff         ACoff and IT*
ACon and IT*                set ACon          ACon and IT*                            set ACoff         ACoff and IT
ACoff and NIT               set ACon          ACon and NIT                            set ACoff         ACoff and IT
ACoff and IT                set ACon          ACon and IT*                            set ACoff         ACoff and IT
ACoff and IT*               set ACon          ACon and IT                            set ACoff         ACoff and IT*

There are two conclusions I have drawn from this:

1) Without the ability for the client to know the current transaction 
state it isn't feasible to use set autocommit = on/off in the client. 
There will either end up being spurious warning messages about 
transaction already in process or no transaction in process, or 
situations where a subsequent rollback can undo the change.  So I will 
stay with the current functionality in the jdbc driver until the FE/BE 
protocol provides access to the transaction status.

2) In one place the current functionality doesn't make sense (at least 
to me).
ACon and NIT                set ACoff         ACoff and IT*

If I am running in autocommit mode and I issue a command I expect that 
command to be committed.  But that is not the case here.  I would have 
expected the result to be:  ACoff and NIT


thanks,
--Barry