Integrate api service with message queue

Question

Currently I'm doing the integration work of one project. In this project, we need to expose a restful api with java framework Wink. Since we have several other components to integrate, we put a message queue(activemq) between the api layer and other service parts.But this time the api layer will communicate to the lower level in an asynchronous way. In my understanding, the restful api should run in a synchronous way. For example, in the api layer, if one thread received a request, the response will get returned in the same thread. So there is a internal mismatch between these 2 communication styles. My question is how can we integrate these 2 parts to make the api layer work without sacrificing the features in message queue like reliability and performance? Any suggestions will be apprciated here. Thanks

Answer 1

Asynchronous callback is possible in REST communication, see this JERSEY framework example: https://jersey.java.net/documentation/latest/async.html

But yes the latency should be controlled as your client would be waiting for server to respond, and would be good if client calls it in AJAX way.

Simplest way would be to fork a new process through "executor service", which sends a message in a channel to lower level api and listens back for response in another channel(MQ communication). And on process completion return a response, which then the higher API will push back to client.