New Asynchronous Servlet Transport in JAX-WS RI

As you know, JAX-WS RI  has long supported publishing of asynchronous web services through the use of  RI specific AsyncProvider api. There have been requests to add the asynchronous support for the SEI based web services (the more common developer paradigm) and standardize it, I hope it would have a place in the future revision of the JAX-WS Spec. But the current AsyncProvider api can serve the purpose for advanced use cases with more control over the SOAP messages. Though this is an important ingredient for making the web services asynchronous, its usefulness could be leveraged only with the support of the underlying transport/communication framework. As Kohsuke mentioned in his blog, JBI has implemented a custom HTTP binding component over Grizzly that has capability to process requests in asynchronous manner.  But, like most other web frameworks, normal JAX-WS web service endpoints are published as servlets running in the web container. The SOAP messages get processed by the jax-ws runtime via servlet request/response. Until servlet 2.5, the servlet request processing is synchronous, i.e if the web service (underlying servlet) is waiting for a resource or event to happen, a container thread has to wait until the request is processed and response is committed. This would result into wasting precious container resources while the thread is blocked. This would be more apparent when you have thousands of concurrent r...

Date: August, 18 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/ramapulavarthi/archive/2010/08/18/new-asynchronous-servlet-transport-jax-ws-ri

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