Thinking Asynchronously

Messaging is an asynchronous technology, which enables delivery to be retried until it succeeds. In contrast, most applications use synchronous function calls; for example: a procedure calling a sub-procedure, one method calling another method, or one procedure invoking another remotely through a remote procedure call (RPC) (such as CORBA and DCOM). Synchronous calls imply that the calling process is halted while the sub-process is executing a function. Even in an RPC scenario, where the called sub-procedure executes in a different process, the caller blocks until the sub-procedure returns control (and the results) to the caller. When using asynchronous messaging, the caller uses a send and forget approach that allows it to continue to execute after it sends the message. As a result, the calling procedure continues to run while the sub-procedure is being invoked.