I have some camel routes with mina sockets and jetty websockets. I am able to broadcast a message to all the clients connected to the websocket but how do i send a message to a specific endpoint. How do i maintain a list of all connected clients with a client id as reference so i can route to a specific client. Is that possible? Will i be able to mention a dynamic client in the to URI?
Or maybe i am thinking about this wrong and i need to create topics on active mq and have the clients subscribe to it. That would mean that i create a topic for every websocket client? and route the message to the right topic.
Am i atleast on the right track here, any examples you can point out? Google was not helpful.
The approach you take depends on how sensitive the client information is. The downside of a single topic with selectors is that anyone can subscribe to the topic without a selector and see all the information for everyone - not usually something that you want to do.
A better scheme is to use a message distribution mechanism (set of Camel routes) that act as an intermediary between the websocket clients and the system producing the messages. This mechanism is responsible for distributing messages from a single destination to client-specitic destinations. I have worked on a couple of banking web front-ends that used a similar scheme.
In order for this to work you first generate for each user a distinct token/UUID; this is presented to the user when the session is established (usually through some sort of profile query/message).
It's essential that the UUID can be worked out as a hash of the clientId rather than being stored in a DB, as it will be used all the time and you want to make sure this is worked out quickly.
The user then uses that information to connect to specific topics that use that UUID as a suffix. For example two users subscribing to an orderConfirmation topic would each subscribe to their own version of that topic:
clientA -> orderConfirmation.71jqsd87162iuhw78162wd7168
clientB -> orderConfirmation.76232hdwe7r23j92irjh291e0d
To keep track of "presence", your clients would need to periodically send a heartbeat message containing their clientId to a well-known topic that your distribution mechanism listens on. Clients should not be able to subscribe to this topic for reads (see ActiveMQ Security). The message distribution mechanism needs to keep in memory a data structure that contains the clientId and the time a heartbeat was last seen.
When a message is received by the distribution mechanism, it checks whether the clientID for which it received the message has a "live/present" session, determines the UUID for the client, and broadcasts the message on the appropriate topic.
Over time this will create a large number of topics on your broker that you don't want hanging around when the user has gone away. You can configure ActiveMQ to delete these if they have been inactive for some time.
You definitely do not want to create separate endpoint for each client.
Topic and a subscription with selector is an elegant way to resolve it.
I would say the best one.
You need single topic, which every client would subscribe to with the selector looking like where clientId in ('${myClientId}', 'EVERYONE'). Now when you want to publish a message to specific client, you set a property clientId to the id of this client. If you want to broadcast, you set it to 'EVERYONE'
I hope I understand the problem right...
Related
TTL can be set on queues, so they will expire after a period of time if they are not used. Is there a similar option for exchanges?
I'm trying to build a social application and each exchange represents a user. Each time someone wants to send a message to this user, he would send the message to the user exchange. If number of the users become large, like 20 million users, there would be 20 million exchanges in the system. I'm afraid that much exchanges degrade the system. Instead I want to only keep exchanges for online users.
By the way the messages are only valuable if the user is online and I don't want to store messages for later delivery.
Having a separate exchange for every user ideed would be overkill. Try a different approach.
Use a single direct exchange.
When a client comes online it creates a new exclusive, auto-delete queue and consumes from it.
The client also binds the single exchange to its queue using the name of the user as the routing key.
Producers publish messages to the single exhange with the name of the user as the routing key of the message.
This will automatically
only keep queues for online users and
discard messages for offline users.
Edit: If a user shall be able to use multiple clients, that's possible using the above approach.
Every client creates a new exclusi auto-delete queue and consumes from it as above.
It binds the single exchange to this queue as above.
Note that it is possible to have multiple bindings from an exchange using identical routing keys. Every client has its own queue and its own binding, even if the routing key on this binding is the same routing key as on another binding created by a different client.
I'm building a basic event based message system for a couple of services.
For my user service, I'm going to use a user topic exchange which will have routing keys like user.event.created, user.event.updated and user.event.deleted.
My logs service will consume user.event.* keys so I can log all events, whereas my email service will only listen for user.event.created as I'll only send out email on creation.
Now say I created a posts service, I want the logs service to consume events from here as well. Is it ok for me to bind both exchanges to the single logs.process queue?
Is there a better way of achieving this?
As long as each of the consume threads has it's own connection, it's fine. So, one thread consumes from topic exchange, the other from direct one etc.
As for the better part, I don't know - would require some more details.
The undelying use case
It is typical pubsub use case: Consider we have M news sources, and there are N subscribers who subscribe to the desired news sources, and who want to get news updates. However, we want these updates to land up in mongodb - essentially maintain most recent 'k' updates (and can be indexed and searched etc.). We want to design for M to scale upto million publishers, N to scale to few millions.
Subscribers' updates are finally received and stored in more than one hosts and their native mongodbs.
Modeling in rabbitmq
Rabbitmq will be used to persist the mappings (who subscribes to which news source).
I have setup a pubsub system in this way: We create publisher exchanges (each mapping to one news source) and of type 'fanout'.
For modelling subscribers, there are two options.
In the first option, have one queue for each subscriber bound to relevant publisher exchanges. And let the client process open connections to all these subscriber queues and receive the updates (and persist them to mongodb). Note that in this option, when the client is restarted, it has to manage list of all susbcribers, and open connections to all subscriber queues it is responsible for.
In the second option, we want to be able to remove overhead of having to explicitly open on each user queue upon startup. Instead, we want to listen to only one queue - representative of all subscribers who will send updates to this client host.
For achieving this, we first create one exchange for each subscriber and let it bind to the publisher exchange(s) that it follows. We let a single queue for each client, and let the subscriber exchange bind to this queue (type=direct) if the subscriber belongs to that client.
Once the client receives the update message, it should come to know which subscriber exchange it came from. Only then we can add it to mongodb for relevant subscriber. Presumably the subscriber exchange should add this information as a new header on the message.
As per rabbitmq docs, I believe there is no way to get achieve this. (Or more specifically, to get the 'delivery path' property from the delivered message, from which we can get this information).
My questions:
Is it possible to add a new header to message as it passes through exchange?
If this is not possible, then can we achieve it through custom exchange and relevant plugin? Any plugin that I can readily use for this purpose?
I am curious as to why rabbitmq is not providing delivery path property as an optional configuration?
Is there any other way I can achieve the same? (See pubsubhubbub note below)
PubSubHubBub
The use case is very similar to what pubsubhubbub protocol provides for. And there is rabbitmq plugin too called rabbithub. However, our system will be a closed system, and I believe that the webhook approach of the protocol is going to be too much of overhead compared to listening on single queue (and from performance perspective.)
The producer (RMQ Client) of the message should add all the required headers (including the originator's identity) before producing (publishing) it on RMQ. These headers are used for routing.
If, while in transit, the message (including headers) needs to be transformed (e.g. adding new headers), it needs to be sent to the transformer (another RMQ Client). This transformer will essentially become the new publisher.
The actual consumer should receive its intended messages (for which it has subscribed to) through single queue. The routing of all its subscribed messages should be arranged on the RMQ Exchange.
Managing the last 'K' updates should neither be the responsibility of the producer nor the consumer. So, it should be done in the transformer. Producers' messages should be routed to this transformer (for storage) before further re-routing to exchange(s) from where consumers consume.
I am currently interested in seeing what channels are subscribed to in a Redis pub/sub application I have. When a client connects to our server, we register them to a channel that looks like:
user:user_id
The reason for this is I want to be able to see who's "online". I currently blindly fire off messages to a channel without knowing if a client is online since it's not critical that they receive these types of messages.
In an effort to make my application smarter, I'd like to be able to discover if a client is online or not using the pub/sub API, and if they are offline, cache their messages to a separate redis queue which I can push to them when they get back online.
This does not have to be 100% accurate, but the more accurate it is, the better. I'm assuming a generic key does not get created when a channel gets subscribed to, so I cannot do something as trivial as:
redis-cli keys user* to find all online users.
The other strategy I've thought of is just maintaining my own Redis Set whenever a user published or removes themselves from a channel (which the client automatically handles when they hop online and close the app). That would be an additional layer of complexity that I need to manage and I'm hoping there is a more trivial approach with the data that's already available.
As of Redis 2.8 you can do:
PUBSUB CHANNELS [pattern]
The PUBSUB CHANNELS command has O(N) complexity, where N is the number of active channels.
So in your case:
redis-cli PUBSUB CHANNELS user*
would give you want you want.
There is currently no command for showing what channels "exist" by way of being subscribed to, but there is and "approved" issue and a pull request that implements this.
https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/221
https://github.com/antirez/redis/pull/412
Due to the nature of this call, it is not something that can scale, and is thus a "DEBUG" command.
There are a few other ways to solve your problem, however.
If you have reason to believe that a channel may be subscribed to, you can send it a message and look at the result. The result is the number of subscribers that got the message. If you got 0, you know that they're not there.
Assuming that your user_ids are incremental, you might be interested in using SETBIT to set a 1 or 0 to a user's offset bit to track presence. You can then do cool things like the new BITCOUNT to see how many users are online, and GETBIT to determine if a specific user is online.
The way I have solved your problem more specifically in the past is by signaling a subscription manager that I have subscribed to a channel. The manager then "pings" the channel by sending a blank message to confirm that there is a subscriber, and occasionally pings the channel thereafter to determine if the user is still online. Not ideal, but better than using DEBUG CHANNELS in production.
From version 2.8.0 redis has a pubsub command that would help in this case:
http://redis.io/commands/pubsub
Remark: currently the state of 2.8.0 is not stable yet (RC2)
I am unaware of any specific way to query what channels are being subscribed to, and you are correct that there isn't any key created when this happens. Also, I wouldn't use the KEYS command in production anyway, as it's really a debugging command.
You have the right idea about using a set to add the user when they're online, and then query this with SISMEMBER <set> <user_id> to determine if the messages should be sent to them or added to a Redis list for processing once they do come online.
You will need to figure out when a user logs off so you can remove them from the list of online users, but I don't know enough about your system to know exactly how you would go about that.
If the connected clients have the ability to send a message back to inform the server that the message(s) were consumed, you could use this to keep track of which messages should be stored for later retrieval.
Cheers,
Mike
* PUBSUB NUMSUB [channel-1 ... channel-N]
Returns the number of subscribers (not counting clients subscribed to patterns) for the specified channels.
https://redis.io/commands/pubsub
Let's say I have a ClientRequestMessage message that contains a request for a specific Client. A web application will generate these requests and they need to be sent to the correct Client for handling. I can think of a few options for this.
I could have a single queue that all messages go to and specific client handlers check a property (like ClientId) to decide whether they care about it. This feels wrong on many levels to me though.
I could publish a message to all of the clients and they could decide whether or not they care about it during handling. This seems like too much traffic and wastes each client's time handling messages they shouldn't care about in the first place though.
I could have client specific queues that these messages get routed too. This one feels the best to me, but I am unsure of how to do it. I'd like to keep it simple and avoid client specific message types, but I am not sure how to tell NServiceBus "for client A send it to client A's queue and for client B send it to client B's queue".
So my question is, what is the best (most efficient? easiest to manage?) way to set this up? I am pretty sure I need to use the distributor, but not positive so thought I would ask.
BONUS QUESTION:
Let's say each client has multiple handlers. How can I make sure only one of them handles a given message? Would I need a distributor per client?
If what you really want is the solution that allows you to have just a single message where you can place a specific filter on the message based on clientId and only route the message to the client when it relates to them then I would use PServiceBus(pservicebus.codeplex.com). It will make it easier for you specific a set of subscriptions for each of your client where their messages are all filtered by clientId into a specific queue or what transport you have available. The below example shows filtering a ChatTopic by the UserName Property and the subscriber only receives the message at the specified transport when the message been published UserName property is not TJ. You are also allowed to use complex filter where you do thing such as GreaterThan("MyComplexProperty.Blah.ID", 5)
Subscriber.New("MyUserName").Durable(false)
.SubscribeTo(Topic.Select<ChatTopic>().NotEqual("UserName", "TJ"))
.AddTransport("Tcp",
Transport.New<TcpTransport>(
transport => {
transport.Format = TransportFormat.Json;
transport.IPAddress = "127.0.0.1";
transport.Port = port;
}), "ChatTopic")
.Save();
You can tell NSB where to put messages by using the MessageEndpointMappings configuration section. You can map a specific message type or a whole assembly to a queue. If you don't want to create specific message types and map them, then I would recommend the publish approach. The overhead of removing a message from the queue is pretty minimal.
If your "client" has many instances of NSB to pick up messages then you will need to use a Distributor. Check out the distributed Pub/Sub documentation.