集成层模式:Service Activator—服务激发器模式

Context
Enterprise beans and other business services need a way to be activated
asynchronously.
Problem
When a client needs to access an enterprise bean, it first looks up the bean's home
object. The client requests the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) component's home to provide a
remote reference to the required enterprise bean. The client then invokes business method
calls on the remote reference to access the enterprise bean services. All these method calls,
such as lookup and remote method calls, are synchronous. The client has to wait until these
methods return.
Another factor to consider is the life cycle of an enterprise bean. The EJB
specification permits the container to passivate an enterprise bean to secondary storage. As
a result, the EJB container has no mechanism by which it can provide a process-like service
to keep an enterprise bean constantly in an activated and ready state. Because the client
must interact with the enterprise bean using the bean's remote interface, even if the bean is
in an activated state in the container, the client still needs to obtain its remote interface via
the lookup process and still interacts with the bean in a synchronous manner.
If an application needs synchronous processing for its server-side business
components, then enterprise beans are an appropriate choice. Some application clients may
require asynchronous processing for the server-side business objects because the clients do
not need to wait or do not have the time to wait for the processing to complete. In cases
where the application needs a form of asynchronous processing, enterprise beans do not
offer this capability in implementations prior to the EJB 2.0 specification.
The EJB 2.0 specification provides integration by introducing message-driven bean,
which is a special type of stateless session bean that offers asynchronous invocation
capabilities. However, the new specification does not offer asynchronous invocation for
other types of enterprise beans, such as stateful or entity beans.
In general, a business service such as a session or entity bean provides only
synchronous processing and thus presents a challenge to implementing asynchronous
processing.
Forces
Enterprise beans are exposed to their clients via their remote interfaces, which allow
only synchronous access.
The container manages enterprise beans, allowing interactions only via the remote
references. The EJB container does not allow direct access to the bean implementation and
its methods. Thus, implementing the JMS message listener in an enterprise bean is not
feasible, since this violates the EJB specification by permitting direct access to the bean
implementation.
An application needs to provide a publish/subscribe or point-to-point messaging
framework where clients can publish requests to enterprise beans for asynchronous
processing.
Clients need asynchronous processing capabilities from the enterprise beans and
other business components that can only provide synchronous access, so that the client can
send a request for processing without waiting for the results.
Clients want to use the message-oriented middleware (MOM) interfaces offered by
the Java Messaging Service (JMS). These interfaces are not integrated into EJB server
products that are based on the pre-EJB 2.0 specification.
An application needs to provide daemon-like service so that an enterprise bean can be
in a quiet mode until an event (or a message) triggers its activity.
Enterprise beans are subject to the container life cycle management, which includes
passivation due to time-outs, inactivity and resource management. The client will have to
invoke on an enterprise bean to activate it again.
The EJB 2.0 specification introduces a message-driven bean as a stateless session
bean, but it is not possible to invoke other types of enterprise beans asynchronously.
Solution
Use a Service Activator to receive asynchronous client requests and messages. On
receiving a message, the Service Activator locates and invokes the necessary business
methods on the business service components to fulfill the request asynchronously.
The ServiceActivator is a JMS Listener and delegation service that requires
implementing the JMS message listener-making it a JMS listener object that can listen to
JMS messages. The ServiceActivator can be implemented as a standalone service. Clients
act as the message generator, generating events based on their activity.
Any client that needs to asynchronously invoke a business service, such as an
enterprise bean, may create and send a message to the Service Activator. The Service
Activator receives the message and parses it to interpret the client request. Once the client's
request is parsed or unmarshalled, the Service Activator identifies and locates the necessary
business service component and invokes business methods to complete processing of the
client's request asynchronously.
The Service Activator may optionally send an acknowledgement to the client after
successfully completing the request processing. The Service Activator may also notify the
client or other services on failure events if it fails to complete the asynchronous request
processing.
The Service Activator may use the services of a Service Locator to locate a business
component. See "Service Locator" on page 368.