Spring AMQP in version 1.6 introduced the AsyncRabbitTemplate which allows the caller of the send and receive operations (sendAndReceive, convertSendAndReceive) not to block. The caller instead gets a handle to the computation in progress in the form of a ListenableFuture or can handle the result in a callback via ListenableFutureCallback
ListenableFuture is a concurrent utility in Spring core and was by inspired by Guava. Basically it is a simple Future but it allows you to register callbacks (success or failure callbacks) to be executed once the computation is complete. If the computation has completed then by adding the callbacks they are executed immediately. Although the ListenableFuture allows the caller to handle the result later but by invoking the get() method it becomes synchronous by blocking the caller.
With the help of ListenableFutureCallback you can register a callback which allows the caller to handle the result asynchronously.
public interface ListenableFuture<T> extends Future<T> {
void addCallback(ListenableFutureCallback<? super T> callback);
void addCallback(SuccessCallback<? super T> successCallback, FailureCallback failureCallback);
}
public interface ListenableFutureCallback<T> extends SuccessCallback<T>, FailureCallback {}
When you pass a payload to one of the send and receive operations AsyncRabbitTemplate calculates a correlation id and together with a RabbitFuture instance forms an entry which is put into its internally managed pending futures ConcurrentMap, returning the reference to the created RabbitFuture.
RabbitFuture is the base class of ListenableFuture in AsyncRabbitTemplate. It makes sure if the response is not received within the configured receive timeout (it defaults to 30 seconds) it cancels the computation, removes itself from the AsyncRabbitTemplates internal ConcurrentMap and completes the future with AmqpReplyTimeoutException.
AsyncRabbitTemplate leverages a RabbitTemplate to delegate the send and receive operations and a SimpleMessageListenerContainer to fetch the responses from the reply queue. Both can be provided externally or constructed internally.
When using Spring Boot an instance of RabbitTemplate is already auto-configured (see RabbitAutoConfiguration), together with a ConnectionFactory. So you only need to provide a SimpleMessageListenerContainer in order to create an instance of AsyncRabbitTemplate.
@Bean
AsyncRabbitTemplate template() {
SimpleMessageListenerContainer container = new SimpleMessageListenerContainer(connectionFactory);
container.setQueueNames(REPLY_QUEUE_NAME);
return new AsyncRabbitTemplate(rabbitTemplate, container);
}
In the above example the first queue the container is configured to listen will be used as the reply queue.
If you fancy to try out these things look into this https://github.com/altfatterz/async-rabbit-template repository.