Designing Asynchronous Interfaces

The distributed nature of web-based computing introduces unpredictable and sometimes very long latencies, which means it may take an operation a long time to complete. If a process executing over the network involves human interaction at the back end, an operation can take on the order of days. If all interactions over the web were synchronous, clients with pending operations could consume resources on their host systems for unacceptably long periods of time.

BEA Workshop for WebLogic Platform provides tools that make it easy for you to build asynchronous web services and controls that don't require clients to block execution while waiting for results. WebLogic for Workshop provides multiple approaches for returning results to your web services' and controls' clients; you can choose the one that best suits each situation.

The topics below describe how to build asynchronous interfaces for your web services and controls.