I need to understand what approaches there are to handle asynchronous operations in REST and what their advantages and disadvantages are. Some approaches I found:
Resource Based: Where the status of an operation is modeled as a status. User makes an async REST call (PUT, POST etc.) gets Accepted or In-Progress response (202). Further a status URI is polled repeatedly via GET to check status/progress/messages from operation execution.
Question: How long should this resource be active at Server? If the client polls in large intervals where in between the operation completes, how do we return the status? Seems like persisting the execution status would work. But how long to persist, when to archive/delete, is this kind of standard approach?
Callback Based: Where an async request is required to have a callback URI. The request gets processed asynchronously and upon completion makes a call to the callback URI with the operation status/result.
Question: This seems more elegant and involving less overhead at the server side. But how to handle scenarios where the callback server is intermittently down, not responding, etc.? Implement a typical retries where the callback URI provides retries configuration as well? Is there any other downside to this approach?
Servlet 3.0 Asynchronous support: Where an HTTP client makes a connection to a Java Servlet, which remains open until it is explicitly closed and until closed client and server can communicate asynchronously over it.
Question: Since its Servlet 3.0 spec, I think Jersey, the Spring REST implementation, doesn't utilize this approach as of now. Is there any specific REST implementation which utilizes a similar approach or pointer on ways to make it possible?
Any other approaches, maybe commercial ones?
Spring 3.2+ supports the async features of Servlet 3.0. From the Spring Blog:
you can make any existing controller method asynchronous by changing it to return a Callable. For example a controller method that returns a view name, can return Callable instead. An #ResponseBody that returns an object called Person can return Callable instead. And the same is true for any other controller return value type.
Jersey 2+ also supports asyncronous servers. See the Asynchronous Services and Clients chapter in the reference docs.
I think, the approach depends on time gap between initial request and the end of operation.
For short-time operations ( < 10s ) I would just keep the request open and return response when operation finished;
For long operations ( < 30m ) I would use servlet 3.0 or Comet model;
For extremely long operations ( hours, days ) good enough way, as for me, is just client-based polling or Comet with big timeouts.
I'm dealing now with the same situation and found the common approach of using Location header response to give a resource that can be monitored to check status (by polling of course). That seems to be the best, but in my case, I'm not creating a resource so I don't have a location to check the status (my async process is just to build a cache page).
You can always use your own headers to give an estimated time to complete the operation. Anyway I'm thinking of using Retry-After header to give an estimated time. What do you guys think?
I know this is old but I thought I'd chime in here to say that if what you want is something that can scale out in a stateless environment then you should go with your first option. You can perform the underlying operation anywhere and if you put the result in something like redis it will not matter to what web server the client makes subsequent polling requests. I'll usually put the polling interval in the response I sent to the client. When there a result is ready I will return the client a SEE OTHER that includes the id of the result in the URI.
Related
In Java in a web service, I have a requirement I want to return the response to the user after configured threshold time reaches and wants to continue processing after that.
Let's say I have a service it does step1, step 2, and the configured threshold is 1 second. Let's say step1 is completed at 1 second I want to return an acknowledgment response to the user and continue processing with step2 and wants to store response in DB or something like that.
Please let me know if anyone has any solutions or thoughts on this problem
There are multiple ways to achieve this
HTTP Layer
On HTTP layer, if the response comes back before the threshold, then I'd be tempted to send back a 200 Success.
However, if it takes more time than the threshold, you could use 202 Accepted
Looking at the RFC, its use case looks like this
6.3.3. 202 Accepted
The 202 (Accepted) status code indicates that the request has been
accepted for processing, but the processing has not been completed.
The request might or might not eventually be acted upon, as it might
be disallowed when processing actually takes place. There is no
facility in HTTP for re-sending a status code from an asynchronous
operation.
The 202 response is intentionally noncommittal. Its purpose is to
allow a server to accept a request for some other process (perhaps a
batch-oriented process that is only run once per day) without
requiring that the user agent's connection to the server persist
until the process is completed. The representation sent with this
response ought to describe the request's current status and point to
(or embed) a status monitor that can provide the user with an
estimate of when the request will be fulfilled.
Now, of course, instead of having a mix of 200 and 202, you could just return 202 everytime
Application Layer
In your application layer, you'll typically want to make use of asynchronous processing for this purpose.
There are multiple ways to leverage this way of working, you can:
Post a message on a queue/topic and let a message broker take care of dispatching it to another part of the app, or another app and let this part do the processing
Save the request inside of a database, and have another service poll the database for new requests, similar to queueing explained above, without JMS
If you're using Java EE, your EJB container allows you to work with #Asynchronous which will call a method asynchronously and return (so you'll be able to return 202)
If you're using Spring, it has an #Async annotation for the same purpose as hereabove
There are definitely other methods you could use to achieve this use case, but I think the ones I presented are the most common ones
Here are two links which seem to be contradicting each other. I'd sooner trust the docs:
Link 1
Request processing on the server works by default in a synchronous processing mode
Link 2
It already is multithreaded.
My question:
Which is correct. Can it be both synchronous and multithreaded?
Why do the docs say the following?:
in cases where a resource method execution is known to take a long time to compute the result, server-side asynchronous processing model should be used
If the docs are correct, why is the default action synchronous? All requests are asynchronous on client-side javascript by default for user experience, it would make sense then that the default action for server-side should also be asynchronous too.
If the client does not need to serve requests in a specific order, then who cares how "EXPENSIVE" the operation is. Shouldn't all operations simply be asynchronous?
Request processing on the server works by default in a synchronous processing mode
Each request is processed on a separate thread. The request is considered synchronous because that request holds up the thread until the request is finished processing.
It already is multithreaded.
Yes, the server (container) is multi-threaded. For each request that comes in, a thread is taken from the thread pool, and the request is tied to the particular request.
in cases where a resource method execution is known to take a long time to compute the result, server-side asynchronous processing model should be used
Yes, so that we don't hold up the container thread. There are only so many threads in the container thread pool to handle requests. If we are holding them all up with long processing requests, then the container may run out of threads, blocking other requests from coming in. In asynchronous processing, Jersey hands the thread back to the container, and handle the request processing itself in its own thread pool, until the process is complete, then send the response up to the container, where it can send it back to the client.
If the client does not need to serve requests in a specific order, then who cares how "EXPENSIVE" the operation is.
Not really sure what the client has to do with anything here. Or at least in the context of how you're asking the question. Sorry.
Shouldn't all operations simply be asynchronous?
Not necessarily, if all the requests are quick. Though you could make an argument for it, but that would require performance testing, and numbers you can put up against each other and make a decision from there. Every system is different.
Because of browser compatibility issues, I have decided to use long polling for a real time syncing and notification system. I use Java on the backend and all of the examples I've found thus far have been PHP. They tend to use while loops and a sleep method. How do I replicate this sort of thing in Java? There is a Thread.sleep() method, which leads me to...should I be using a separate thread for each user issuing a poll? If I don't use a separate thread, will the polling requests be blocking up the server?
[Update]
First of all, yes it is certainly possible to do a straightforward, long polling request handler. The request comes in to the server, then in your handler you loop or block until the information you need is available, then you end the loop and provide the information. Just realize that for each long polling client, yes you will be tying up a thread. This may be fine and perhaps this is the way you should start. However - if your web server is becoming so popular that the sheer number of blocking threads is becoming a performance problem, consider an asynchronous solution where you can keep a large numbers of client requests pending - their request is blocking, that is not responding until there is useful data, without tying up one or more threads per client.
[original]
The servlet 3.0 spec provides a standard for doing this kind asynchronous processing. Google "servlet 3.0 async". Tomcat 7 supports this. I'm guessing Jetty does also, but I have not used it.
Basically in your servlet request handler, when you realize you need to do some "long" polling, you can call a method to create an asynchronous context. Then you can exit the request handler and your thread is freed up, however the client is still blocking on the request. There is no need for any sleep or wait.
The trick is storing the async context somewhere "convenient". Then something happens in your app and you want to push data to the client, you go find that context, get the response object from it, write your content and invoke complete. The response is sent back to the client without you having to tie up a thread for each client.
Not sure this is the best solution for what you want but usually if you want to do this at period intervals in java you use the ScheduleExecutorService. There is a good example at the top of the API document. The TimeUnit is a great enum as you can specify the period time easily and clearly. So you can specify it to run every x minutes, hours etc
In designing my GWT/GAE app, it has become evident to me that my client-side (GWT) will be generating three types of requests:
Synchronous - "answer me right now! I'm important and require a real-time response!!!"
Asynchronous - "answer me when you can; I need to know the answer at some point but it's really not all that ugent."
Command - "I don't need an answer. This isn't really a request, it's just a command to do something or process something on the server-side."
My game plan is to implement my GWT code so that I can specify, for each specific server-side request (note: I've decided to go with RequestFactory over traditional GWT-RPC for reasons outside the scope of this question), which type of request it is:
SynchronousRequest - Synchronous (from above); sends a command and eagerly awaits a response that it then uses to update the client's state somehow
AsynchronousRequest - Asynchronous (from above); makes an initial request and somehow - either through polling or the GAE Channel API, is notified when the response is finally received
CommandRequest - Command (from above); makes a server-side request and does not wait for a response (even if the server fails to, or refuses to, oblige the command)
I guess my intention with SynchronousRequest is not to produce a totally blocking request, however it may block the user's ability to interact with a specific Widget or portion of the screen.
The added kicker here is this: GAE strongly enforces a timeout on all of its frontend instances (60 seconds). Backend instances have much more relaxed constraints for timeouts, threading, etc. So it is obvious to me that AsynchronousRequests and CommandRequests should be routed to backend instances so that GAE timeouts do not become an issue with them.
However, if GAE is behaving badly, or if we're hitting peak traffic, or if my code just plain sucks, I have to account for the scenario where a SynchronousRequest is made (which would have to go through a timeout-regulated frontend instance) and will timeout unless my GAE server code does something fancy. I know there is a method in the GAE API that I can call to see how many milliseconds a request has before its about to timeout; but although the name of it escapes me right now, it's what this "fancy" code would be based off of. Let's call it public static long GAE.timeLeftOnRequestInMillis() for the sake of this question.
In this scenario, I'd like to detect that a SynchronousRequest is about to timeout, and somehow dynamically convert it into an AsynchronousRequest so that it doesn't time out. Perhaps this means sending an AboutToTimeoutResponse back to the client, and force the client to decide about whether to resend as an AsynchronousRequest or just fail. Or perhaps we can just transform the SynchronousRequest into an AsynchronousRequest and push it to a queue where a backend instance will consume it, process it and return a response. I don't have any preferences when it comes to implementation, so long as the request doesn't fail or timeout because the server couldn't handle it fast enough (because of GAE-imposed regulations).
So then, here is what I'm actually asking here:
How can I wrap a RequestFactory call inside SynchronousRequest, AsynchronousRequest and CommandRequest in such a way that the RequestFactory call behaves the way each of them is intended? In other words, so that the call either partially-blocks (synchronous), can be notified/updated at some point down the road (asynchronous), or can just fire-and-forget (command)?
How can I implement my requirement to let a SynchronousRequest bypass GAE's 60-second timeout and still get processed without failing?
Please note: timeout issues are easily circumvented by re-routing things to backend instances, but backends don't/can't scale. I need scalability here as well (that's primarily why I'm on GAE in the first place!) - so I need a solution that deals with scalable frontend instances and their timeouts. Thanks in advance!
If the computation that you want GAE to do is going to take longer than 60 seconds, then don't wait for the results to be computed before sending a response. According to your problem definition, there is no way to get around this. Instead, clients should submit work orders, and wait for a notification from the server when the results are ready. Requests would consist of work orders, which might look something like this:
class ComputeDigitsOfPiWorkOrder {
// parameters for the computation
int numberOfDigitsToCompute;
// Used by the GAE app to contact the requester when results are ready.
ClientId clientId;
}
This way, your GAE app can respond as soon as the work order is saved (e.g. in Task Queue), and doesn't have to wait until it actually finishes calculating a billion digits of pi before responding. Your GWT client then waits for the result using the Channel API.
In order to give some work orders higher priority, you can use multiple task queues. If you want Task Queue work to scale automatically, you'll want to use push queues. Implementing priority using push queues is a little tricky, but you can configure high priority queues to have faster feed rate.
You could replace Channel API with some other notification solution, but that would probably be the most straightforward.
This is continuation of this question:
Return #Async method result in Spring MVC and return it to Ajax client
I have #Async task which calculates something and return it to the Future the calculation happens on the request and might take up to 15 minutes. I don't want to create new Ajax request every few seconds to check whether calculation is done and I don't want to keep my connection Open for up to 15 minutes till result is calculated.
What might be the best solution for Spring MVC in such cases?
I agree, you definitely don't want to keep the connection open.
With respect to eliminating polling requests, I'm not sure you have a choice.
Remember HTTP is a stateless request/response protocol.
You will need some sort of polling to check on the status.
Can you send out an email to the user containing a link to the calculation once it is done?
You can also take a look at the Comet framework. Comet allows us to extend HTTP capabilities by keeping open a connection and allowing the server to push data to the client.