Invocation Listener for EJB 3 / web service?

Question

We have a system using EJB 3 Stateless bean which is also exposed as web service.

There's a integration request from other team that want our system to fire a notification to other system after invocation (by web services or other means). Since this is not totally related to our system I would prefer to have this feature loosely coupled with our own system instead of hard coding these features in to our system code.

Is there any feature on EJB or web services that can achieve what I desire? We would require a method level invocation listener so that when the EJB method/ web service get invoked, it can trigger a callback/message so we can do something according to it. I would expect it to be some kind of annotation/configuration for setting up JMS or something.

We are using JBoss as the application server. If there's any JBoss specific solution it's also welcomed.

Answer 1

I would suggest two options:

• use JMS. When you mentioned loose coupling, JMS first crossed my mind - you can put a message on some queue/topic after method invocation and let the listener to perform futher actions. JMS messages can carry various kinds of objects - the only request is that class implements Serializable ( ObjectMessage#setObject ); other advantage is that you can (un)deploy your Stateless bean and other system independently. They can be on different JVMs.

• use Interceptors. Technically, they would be invoked before your methods runs, but of course there is always some nice workaround :-) Here is the official documentation about Interceptors, but since you mentioned that you're using JBoss, there can be also found some interesting material on JBoss pages .