Question

Our team at work chose to develop web services using all the tools that NetBeans 7.1.2 provides.

Unfortunately, our web services are too unstable and a lot of times offline. It’s something we can’t solve now. Our decision was to implement a timeout in our clients. But we didn’t find any option or documentation about it.

Is there a way to make clients throw an exception when the service takes, for example, 5 seconds to return an answer? So we can’t catch this exception and treat the view’s flow.

I’m asking because there are ways to implement it with threads and time counters but it’s obvious that other programmers had gotten already the same issue.

By the way, we’re using JAX-WS.

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

Use java.util.concurrent package classes. For example, you can execute Future instance with timeout: future.get(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS), and if it excepts with TimeoutException, you can react as you want:

Future<String> future = executor.submit(new Callable<String>() {
    public String call() {
        return webService.executeServiceMethod();
    }
});
try {
    String result = future.get(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
    processResult(result);
} catch (TimeoutException ex) {
    displayMessageToUserOrExecuteAgain();
}