A Generic Framework to Execute Tasks Asynchronously

Abstract

The concept of long running tasks is prevalent in some business applications; these are processes that might take substantial amount of time for the execution to finish. While these tasks may be part of the business flow, a better design would be to allow the user to continue to do other stuff rather than wait till this task finishes. Examples of such common tasks would be, sending out bulk emails, file streaming to a physical server, auditing of user actions. Although these are part of the business flow, the user does not need to wait till the execution of the task finishes; the user may as well go on doing other stuff rather than wait till these long running tasks finishes, the user might check up on the status of the task as part of another business flow. The most common way that is employed, is to divert the task to a reliable queue, and a demon service would pick up the task one at a time and execute it. The project goal is to create a generic framework to execute tasks asynchronously. This framework will provide common services like thread management, memory management etc. The framework is a plug in based framework that allows developers to plug in the implementation detail of task execution, and the rest of the common framework level features will be provided by this framework. The project provides architecture and a design guideline that can be used to implement this project in other technologies like Java. The framework has been evaluated by a set of test cases that impose the validity of the requirements and a brief comparison of the framework to current approaches.