Send(email) method is delaying servlet's response

Question

hello ,
i have a servlet that store a message in the DB ,
after the message was stored ,
a requestDispatcher is called to forward to the "msg sent" screen.
than there is method that makes a call to an ejb method to send the msg via email like....
user_message msg = dispatcher.getMessage();
persister.store(Message);
request.getRequestDispatcher("/msgSent.jsp").forward(request,response);
Mailer.sendNotification(msg.destination.email);
the problem is : even though i called to the request dispatcher it doesnt forward the message till
the mail server sends a - 250 OK
is there a way to solve it without storing data ..?

Answer 1

You've stored the message in the DB? Does that include all the sender & receiver info?
If it does you could probably have a thread (started on application startup) whose job it is to pick up messages added to the queue and to send them.
It is something that worked really well at my last job. The page submits with the request to send the message. Because the message required a lot of processing we stuck the message data on a queue with a NOTPROCESSED status. The thread woke up every ten seconds and grabbed the top ten NOTPROCESSED message (changing status to PROCESSING) and processed them. In the meantime, the page had returned to the user and the sending entity had a status of "sending".
We found that acceptable where a synchronous processing would take a while and page responsiveness is important.
Another option is to submit the page but also rewrite the current page with javascript or somesuch. You can display a message "sending, page will reload when sent" or somesuch. I've seen it done elsewhere. I think there is another way to do it but don't know enough to comment on that.
Mark