Tag: asynchronous

Is Asynchronous EJB Just a Gimmick?

In previous articles (here and here) I showed that creating non-blocking asynchronous applications could increase performance when the server is under a heavy load. EJB 3.1 introduced the @Asynchronous annotation for specifying that a method will return its result at some time in the future. The Javadocs state that either void or a Future must be returned. An example of a service using this annotation is shown in the following listing: The annotation is on line 4. The method returns a Future of type String and does so on line 10 by wrapping the output in an AsyncResult. At the point that client code calls the EJB method, the container intercepts the call and creates a task which it will run on a different thread, so that it can return a Future immediately. When the container then runs the task using a different thread, it calls the EJB's method and uses the AsyncResult to complete the Future which the caller was given. There are several problems with this code, even though it looks exactly like the code in all the examples found on the internet. For example, the Future class only contains blocking methods for getting at the result of the Future, rather than any methods for registering callbacks for when it is completed. That results in code like the following, which is bad when the container is under load: This kind of code is bad, because it causes threads to block meaning that they cannot do anything useful during that…

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