Routed Message Driven Beans: A new Abstraction for using EJBs

Asynchronous messaging between cooperating software components proves to be useful in many scenarios. One framework supporting this functionality is Sun's J2EE platform with its Message-Driven Beans (MDB) model. We present a novel way to use MDBs by providing a way to add routing information to the messages, which is then used to send a message through a given path of processing components. We call this model Routed Message-Driven Beans (RMDB), and the two main topics that are important for RMDBs are (1) the message format that is used for the routing information, and (2) the API which can be used by programmers to take advantage of the abstraction provided by RMDBs. Performance measurements show that the overhead caused by our RMDB framework is acceptable if messages are routed through several EJBs.