Spring's JMS Design Question : Decouple processing of messages

Question

I'm using a message listener to process some messages from MQ based on Spring's DefaultMessageListenerContainer. After I receive a message, I have to make a Web Service (WS) call. However, I don't want to do this in the onMessage method because it would block the onMessage method until the invocation of WS is successful and this introduces latency in dequeuing of messages from the queue. How can I decouple the invocation of the Web Service by calling it outside of the onMesage method or without impacting the dequeuing of messages?

Thanks,

Answer 1

I think you might actually want to invoke the web service from your onMessage. Why do you want to dequeue messages quickly, then delay further processing? If you do what you're saying, you'd probably have to introduce another level of queueing, or some sort of temporary "holding" collection, which is redundant. The point of the queue is to hold messages, and your message listener will pull them off and process them as quickly as possible.

If you are looking for a way to maximize throughput on the queue, you might think about making it multi-threaded, so that you have multiple threads pulling messages off the queue to invoke the web service. You can easily do this by setting the "concurrentConsumers" configuration on the DefaultMessageListenerContainer. If you set concurrentConsumers to 5, you'll have 5 threads pulling messages off the queue to process. It does get tricky if you have to maintain ordering on the messages, but there may be solutions to that problem if that's the case.

Answer 2

I agree with answer provided before me , however I can see a usecase similar to this very common in practice. I'm adding my two cents It might be valid in some cases that you don't want to do time consuming work in your onMessage Thread (which is pulling message from Q)

We have something similar in one workflow, where if user selects some XYZ option on GUI that means at server we need to connect to another external webservice to get ABCD in this case we do not make call to webservice in onMessage Thread and use ThreadPool to dispatch and handle that call.

If something wrong happens during webservice call we broadcast that to GUI as separate Message , there is concept of request id which is preserved across messages so that GUI can relate error messages. You can use ExecutorService implementation to submit task.

hope it helps.