I'd like to start a discussion on how, from an API perspective,
applications can use the request/response pattern. If we get this
right, we will remove a significant barrier to adoption of AMQP.
Middleware messaging systems typically do a poor job of supporting this
pattern. The Qpid APIs are quite lacking in this regard (requester
creates and subscribes to a temporary queue with a _unique_ name and
places this name in the reply-to field).
Proton Messenger supports request/reply (see
examples/messenger/$LANG/{client,server}) as follows:
The requester (client) has to put _something_ into the request message's
reply_to field. It also sets the correlation_id field if it needs to
dispatch multiple responses. The responder (server) must copy the
request message's reply_to field to the response message's address field
and also copy the correlation_id.
This API is good for the case where the client wants the response to go
to a third party. In this case the reply_to is well understood to be
the address of the third party receiver. However in the more common
case where the response is intended to come back to the client, it's not
clear at all what to put in the reply_to field.
I propose that we allow the client to simply say
request_msg.reply_expected(cid)
(I added the correlation_id argument because it's almost always going to
be needed). Further, the server could use
reply_msg.in_reply_to(request_msg)
which would take care of the addresses and the correlation_id. It also
provides a place to report an error if a request cannot be replied to
(absent or invalid reply_to address) rather than force each server
implementer to code this check.
Thoughts?
-Ted
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