Asynchronous Remote Services - The future or the callback

In previous postings I described how ECF is now making it very easy for OSGi service developers to expose asynchronous/non-blocking remote method calls to clients.

In short, all that's now required is to create an asynchronous version of the service's OSGi service interface. See this documentation for example and source. Just declaring this asynchronous interface is all that's needed. At proxy discovery time, ECF's implementation of OSGi remote services will provide the implementation of this asynchronous interface.

Future or Callback

There are various approaches to doing asynchronous remote method invocation, and two common ones are callbacks and futures. For example, GWT uses callbacks, while Amazon EC2 uses futures for exposing asynchronous access to their APIs (like SNS, SQS, etc). ECF's asynchronous remote services supports both of these approaches (futures and callbacks). The asynchronous service interface declaration can, for a given synchronous method declaration, use either a callback, or a future, or both.

For example, let's say we have the following synchronous service interface method:

String foo(String bar);

The async declaration for this method using a callback would look like this:

void fooAsync(String bar, IAsyncCallback);

The async declaration for thie method using a future would look like this:

IFuture fooAsync(String bar);

And that's it. The remote service client can then use either/both of these fooAsync methods (if they are declared, of course), simply by casting the proxy to the async service interface type and calling the appropriate fooAsync method with the necessary params.

In this way, the remote service designer can determine what asynchronous style the client will have available...by declaring fooAsync using callback, future, both, or neither.