DDevelopment & Design

Scheduling tasks using Message Queue

Introduction

How to schedule your task for later execution? You often create table in database, configure job that checks if due time of any task occured and then execute it.

But there is easier way if only you have message broker with your application… You could publish/send your message and tell it that it should be delivered with specified delay.

Scheduling messages using ActiveMQ

ActiveMQ is open source message broker written in Java. It is implementation of JMS (Java Message Service).

You could start its broker with scheduling support by adding flag schedulerSupport to broker configuration:

<beans ...>
    ...
    <broker xmlns="http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core"
            brokerName="localhost"
            dataDirectory="${activemq.data}"
            schedulerSupport="true">
            ...
    </broker>
    ...
</beans>

 

Now, if you want to delay receiving message by few seconds, you could add property during message creation, e.g.:

message.setLongProperty(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULED_DELAY, 8000)

Delay unit is miliseconds.

Of course queue must be persisted.

When you listen for message on the same queue, then you will see that message indeed will be received with 8 second delay.

...
Send time: Tue Dec 01 18:51:23 CET 2015
...
Message received at Tue Dec 01 18:51:31 CET 2015
...

Scheduling messages using RabbitMQ

Scheduling tasks is not only the feature of ActiveMQ. It is also available with RabbitMQ.

RabitMQ is message broker written in Erlang. It uses protocol AMQP.

First you have to install plugin rabbitmq_delayed_message_exchange. It could be done via command:

rabbitmq-plugins enable --offline rabbitmq_delayed_message_exchange

You have to define exchange in RabbitMQ which will use features from this plugin. Queue for delayed messages should be bound to this exchange. Routing key should be set to queue name.

channel.exchangeDeclare(exchange, 'x-delayed-message', true, false, ['x-delayed-type': 'direct']);
channel.queueBind(queue, exchange, queue);
channel.queueDeclare(queue, true, false, false, null);

Of course queue must be persisted.

To test it just publish new message with property x-delay:

channel.basicPublish(
    exchange, 
    queue, 
    new AMQP.BasicProperties.Builder().headers('x-delay': 8000).build(),
    "Message: $currentUuid".bytes
)

Message will be delayed with 8 seconds:

...
Send time: Tue Dec 01 19:04:18 CET 2015
...
Message received at Tue Dec 01 19:04:26 CET 2015
...

Conclusion

Why you create similar mechanism for handling scheduled tasks on your own, when you could use your message brokers and delayed messages to schedule future tasks?

Sources are available here.

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Spring autowire with qualifiers

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"category": "reference",
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"author": "Nigel Rees"
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]

Have a nice JSON hacking!From time to time I have a need to do some fixes in my json data. In a world of flat files I do this with grep/sed/awk tool chain. How to handle it for JSON? Searching for a solution I came across the JSONPath. It quite mature tool (from 2007) but I haven't hear about it so I decided to share my experience with others.
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Complexity of Complexity


The second keynote of the first day, was Ken Sipe talking about complexity. He made a good point that there is a difference between complex and complicated, and that we often recognize things as complex only because we are less familiar with them. This goes more interesting the moment you realize that the shift in last 20 years of computer languages, from the "Less is more" paradigm (think Java, ASM) to "More is better" (Groovy/Scala/Closure), where you have more complex language, with more powerful and less verbose syntax, that is actually not more complicated, it just looks less familiar.

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Ken also pointed out, that while Entity Service Bus looks really simple on diagrams, it's usually very difficult and complicated to use from the perspective of the programmer. And that's probably why it gets chosen so often - the guys selling/buying it, look no deeper than on the diagram.

 

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Venkat Subramaniam with Dima
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Sadek Drobi's talk about Iteratees in Play 2.0 was very refreshing. Perhaps because I've never used Play before, but the presentation was flawless, with well explained problems, concepts and solutions.
Sadek started with a reflection on how much CPU we waste waiting for IO in web development, then moved to Play's Iteratees, to explain the concept and implementation, which while very different from the that overused Request/Servlet model, looked really nice and simple. I'm not sure though, how much the problem is present when you have a simple service, serving static content before your app server. Think apache (and faster) before tomcat. That won't fix the upload/download issue though, which is beautifully solved in Play 2.0

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For the review of the second day of the conference, go here.