How manage heavy task under Java/Spring?

Question

I have a dashboard where users can do modification to their customers datas. Some modifications needs heavy processing on all those customers. I don't want to block my user waiting that the task finished so how can I manage this in background?

I saw Spring Batch but I'm not sure it's the good answer. Is there anything else?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

You already have an accepted answer, but I wanted to throw in another option FYI.

• If you want to run within the same JVM, @Async and a task executor will work.
• If you have a big job that needs progress tracking, resumes, etc. and doesn't user need interaction, Spring Batch works.
• If you have big jobs that you want to trigger remotely, or as part of a message driven architecture, Spring Batch Integration is a new effort to better combine Spring Integration and Spring Batch.

Answer 2

You should have a separte process or application to process this kind of heavy task. Your main application have to communicate with this heavy-task-processor via any method like JMS, JGroups, ConcurrentLinkedQueue, or whatever you want. You can process (deque) each task one at time or using a thread pool. When the task is finish you have to implement a way to inform the main application the task has finished (JMS, subscription, etc..)

Answer 3

It is not a Spring specific feature, but if you work under a commercial java application server (say websphere, weblogic), you will have some implementation of workmanagers.

http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/1.4/api/javax/resource/spi/work/WorkManager.html

These are container-managed threadpools used to send work into the background. You will find tools in your admin console to configure and fine tune them.

Answer 4

See (google) @Async and or Spring AMQP / JMS