RPC Services vs. Messaging Service

 

BlazeDS uses two patterns for sending and receiving messages:

the request/reply pattern and

the publish/subscribe pattern.

 

RemoteObject, HTTPService, and WebService components use the request/reply message pattern, in which the Flex component makes a request and receives a reply to that request.

 

The RPC components are designed for client applications in which a call and response model is a good choice for accessing external data. These components let the client make asynchronous requests to remote services that process the requests, and then return data to your Flex application.

The RPC components call a remote service, and then store response data from the service in an ActionScript or XML object from which you obtain the data. You can use the RPC components in the client application to work with three types of RPC services: remote object services with the RemoteObject component, web services with the WebService component, and HTTP services with the HTTPService component.

 

You declare RemoteObject components in MXML or ActionScript to connect to remote services. Use the RemoteObject component to call methods on a Java class or ColdFusion component.

 

 

Producer and Consumer components use the publish/subscribe message pattern. In this pattern, the Producer publishes a message to a destination defined on the BlazeDS server. All Consumers subscribed to that destination receive the message.

 

The Messaging Service supports publish-subscribe messaging. In publish-subscribe messaging, each message can have multiple consumers. You use this type of messaging when you want more than one consumer to receive the same message. Examples of applications that can use publish-subscribe messaging are auction sites, stock quote services, and other applications that require one message to be sent to many subscribers.

 

You can support point-to-point messaging, also known as queue-based messaging, between Flex clients by using the JMSAdapter and bridging to a JMS queue.

The Messaging Service supports bridging BlazeDS to Java Message Service (JMS) messaging destinations by using the JMSAdapter. The JMSAdapter lets Flex clients publish messages to and consume messages from a JMS server.The JMSAdapter supports topic-based and queue-based messaging.The JMSAdapter class lets Flex applications participate in existing messaging-oriented middleware (MOM) systems. Therefore, a Java application can publish messages to and respond to messages from Flex applications.

JMS queues are point-to-point, unlike topics which are one-to-many.A better choice for point-to-point messaging is to use the ActionScriptAdapter in conjunction with message filtering on the client side.