I have a web-app where when the user submits a request, we send a JMS message to a remote service and then wait for the reply. (There are also async requests, and we have various niceties set up for message replay, etc, so we’d prefer to stick with JMS instead of, say, HTTP)
In How should I implement request response with JMS?, ActiveMQ seems to discourage the idea of either temporary queues per request or temporary consumers with selectors on the JMSCorrelationID, due to the overhead involved in spinning them up.
However, if I use pooled consumers for the replies, how do I dispatch from the reply consumer back to the original requesting thread?
I could certainly write my own thread-safe callback-registration/dispatch, but I hate writing code I suspect has has already been written by someone who knows better than I do.
That ActiveMQ page recommends Lingo, which hasn’t been updated since 2006, and Camel Spring Remoting, which has been hellbanned by my team for its many gotcha bugs.
Is there a better solution, in the form of a library implementing this pattern, or in the form of a different pattern for simulating synchronous request-reply over JMS?
Related SO question:
- Is it a good practice to use JMS Temporary Queue for synchronous use?, which suggests that spinning up a consumer with a selector on the JMSCorrelationID is actually low-overhead, which contradicts what the ActiveMQ documentation says. Who’s right?
A colleague suggested a potential solution– one response queue/consumer per webapp thread, and we can set the return-address to the response queue owned by that particular thread. Since these threads are typically long-lived (and are re-used for subsequent web requests), we only have to suffer the overhead at the time the thread is spawned by the pool.
That said, this whole exercise is making me rethink JMS vs HTTP… 🙂