SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR STORE AND FORWARD ROUTING FOR DISTRIBUTED DESTINATIONS

• US 20080267209A1
• Filed: 04/24/2008
• Published: 10/30/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 04/24/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Oracle International Corporation (Oracle Corporation)
• Original Assignee: BEA Systems Incorporated (Oracle Corporation)
• Inventors: Barnes, Thomas E., Gallagher, William John
• Granted Patent: US 8,094,669 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 370/429
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/10 Flow control; Congestion control
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/125 by balancing the load, e.g. traffic engineering

Abstract

The present invention enables a store-and-forward service providing an efficient and reliable forwarding of messages stored in a message queue to a distributed destination. It provides customers with high availability and scalability for applications such as JMS queues and topics. It achieves load balancing and failover amongst all individual members of the distributed destination while ensuring that each message is delivered exactly once.

Claims

1. A system to support messaging service for storing and forwarding messages to a distributed destination, comprising:

a source operable to produce a plurality of messages;

a source queue operable to store the plurality of messages;

a plurality of member destinations of the distributed destination, wherein each of the plurality of member destinations is operable to accept and process one or more of the plurality of messages; and

a forwarder operable to;

select one of the plurality of member destinations from the distributed destination using load balancing;

consume one or more of the plurality of messages from the source queue; and

deliver the one or more of the plurality of messages to the selected member destination exactly once.

2. The system according to claim 1, wherein:

the messaging service can be Java®

Messaging Service (JMS).

3. The system according to claim 1, wherein:

the message is one of a text, an image, a voice, a telex, a fax, an e-mail, a paging, and an electronic data describing events, requests, and replies over a communication network.

4. The system according to claim 1, wherein:

the source is one of a producer, a front-end for a subsystem, a Web Service client for a Web services subsystem, and a sending agent.

5. The system according to claim 1, wherein:

each of the plurality of member destinations can be one of a queue, a topic, a remote server instance, a cluster, a JMS destination, a Web Services component, and a receiving agent.

6. The system according to claim 1, wherein:

the distributed destination locates on a cluster of one or more servers, each of which is a JMS server or a Web server.

7. The system according to claim 1, wherein:

the load balancing is round-robin load balancing.

8. The system according to claim 1, wherein:

the source queue is further operable to persist the one or more of the plurality of messages to disk before delivering.

9. The system according to claim 1, wherein:

the source queue is further operable to assign a unique sequence number to each of the one or more of the plurality of messages.

10. The system according to claim 9, wherein:

the forwarder is further operable to;

examine the sequence number of one of the plurality of messages; and

perform a lookup in a table to determine which member destination the message should be forwarded to.

11. The system according to claim 1, wherein:

the forwarder is further operable to;

deliver the one or more of the plurality of messages exactly once after network failure via at least one of;

XA transaction; and

resending the one or more of the plurality of messages to the member destination, which is operable to detect and discard duplicated messages resent; and

/or

resending the one or more of the plurality of messages to the same physical member destination in the distributed destination.

12. The system according to claim 1, wherein:

the forwarder is further operable to;

provide ordered forwarding of sequences of multiple sub-orderings from a local destination to a remote distributed remote destination;

preserve quality of service even in the event of typical failures (abrupt process, machine, or network crash) and a subsequent restart;

be efficient in that it can be implemented using an algorithm that yields the same persistent I/O count as algorithms that don'"'"'t preserve exactly-once or ordering;

require no significant additional implementation on the remote destinations other than a duplicate elimination algorithm; and

have no dependency on the XA transaction standard.

13. A method to support messaging service for storing and forwarding messages to a distributed destination, comprising:

producing and storing a plurality of messages;

selecting one of the plurality of member destinations from the distributed destination using load balancing;

consuming one or more of the plurality of messages and delivering them to the selected member destination exactly once; and

accepting and processing the one or more of the plurality of messages at the selected member destination.

14. The method according to claim 13, further comprising:

persisting the one or more of the plurality of messages to disk before delivering.

15. The method according to claim 13, further comprising:

assigning a unique sequence number to each of the one or more of the plurality of messages.

16. The method according to claim 15, further comprising:

examining the sequence number of one of the plurality of messages; and

performing a lookup in a table to determine which member destination the message should be forwarded to.

17. The method according to claim 13, further comprising:

resending the one or more of the plurality of messages to the member destination after network failure; and

detecting and discarding duplicated messages.

18. The method according to claim 17, further comprising:

resending the one or more of the plurality of messages are to the same physical member destination in the distributed destination.

19. A machine readable medium having instructions stored thereon that when executed cause a system to:

produce and store a plurality of messages;

select one of the plurality of member destinations from the distributed destination using load balancing;

consume one or more of the plurality of messages and deliver them to the selected member destination exactly once; and

accept and process the one or more of the plurality of messages at the selected member destination.

20. A system to support messaging service for storing and forwarding messages to a distributed destination, comprising:

means for producing and storing a plurality of messages;

means for selecting one of the plurality of member destinations from the distributed destination using load balancing;

means for consuming one or more of the plurality of messages and means for delivering them to the selected member destination exactly once; and

means for accepting and processing the one or more of the plurality of messages at the selected member destination.