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I wanted to check the viability of the design approach to use Message Oriented middle-ware (MOM) technology like JMS or ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ for handling asynchronous processing within single web application i.e. the publisher and the subscriber to the MOM server will be contained in the same web application. The rationale behind this design is to offload some of the heavy duty processing functionality as a background asynchronous operation. The publisher in this case is the server side real-time web service method which need to respond back instantaneously (< than 1 sec) to the calling web service client and the publisher emits the message on MOM Topic. The subscriber is contained in the same web application as the publisher and the subscriber uses the message to asynchronously processes the complex slightly more time consuming (5-7 seconds) functionality. With this design we can avoid having to spawn new threads within the application server container for handling the heavy duty complex processing functionality.

Does using MOM server in this case an overkill where the message publisher and message subscriber are contained in the same web server address space? From what I have read MOM tech is used mainly for inter-application communication and wanted to check if it is fine to use MOM for intra-application communication.

Let know your thoughts.

Thanks,

zulu99
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1 Answers1

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Perhaps you will not think it is a good example but in the JEE world using JMS for intra-application communication is quite common. Spawning new threads is considered a bad practive and message-driven beans make consuming messages relatively easy and you get transaction support. A compliant application server like GlassFish has JMS on board so production and consumption of messages does not involve socket communication as will be the case with a standalone ActiveMQ. But there might be reasons to have a standalone JMS, e.g. if there is a cluster of consumers and you want the active instances to take over work from the failed ones... but then the standalone JMS server becomes the single point of failure and now you want a cluster of them and so on.

One significant feature of JMS is (optional) message persistence. You may be concerned that the long-running task fails for some reason and the client's request will be lost. But persistent messages are much more expensive as they cause disk IO.

From what you've described I can tell that of the usual features of MOM (asynchronous processing, guaranteed delivery, order of messages) you only need asynchronous processing. So if guarantees are not important I would use some kind of a thread pool.

Alexander
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