Using Delayed queues in practice

Often there are use cases when you have some kind of work or job queue and there is a need not to handle each work item or job immediately but with some delay. For example, if user clicks a button which triggers some work to be done, and one second later user realizes he / she was mistaken and job shouldn't start at all. Or, f.e. there could be a use case when some work elements in a queue should be removed after some delay (expiration).

There are a lot of implementations out there, but one I would like to describe is using pure JDK concurrent framework classes: DelayedQueue and Delayed interface.

Let me start with simple (and empty) interface which defines the work item. I am skipping the implementation details like properties and methods as those are not important.

package com.example.delayed;

public interface WorkItem {
   // Some properties and methods here
}

The next class in our model will represent the postponed work item and implement Delayed interface. There are just few basic concepts to take into account: the delay itself and the actual time the respective work item has been submitted. This is how expiration would be calculated. So let's do that by introducing PostponedWorkItem class.

package com.example.delayed;

import java.util.concurrent.Delayed;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;

public class PostponedWorkItem implements Delayed {
    private final long origin;
    private final long delay;
    private final WorkItem workItem;

    public PostponedWorkItem( final WorkItem workItem, final long delay ) {
        this.origin = System.currentTimeMillis();
        this.workItem = workItem;
        this.delay = delay;
    }

    @Override
    public long getDelay( TimeUnit unit ) {
        return unit.convert( delay - ( System.currentTimeMillis() - origin ), 
                TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS );
    }

    @Override
    public int compareTo( Delayed delayed ) {
        if( delayed == this ) {
            return 0;
        }

        if( delayed instanceof PostponedWorkItem ) {
            long diff = delay - ( ( PostponedWorkItem )delayed ).delay;
            return ( ( diff == 0 ) ? 0 : ( ( diff < 0 ) ? -1 : 1 ) );
        }

        long d = ( getDelay( TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS ) - delayed.getDelay( TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS ) );
        return ( ( d == 0 ) ? 0 : ( ( d < 0 ) ? -1 : 1 ) );
    }
}

As you can see, we create new instance of the class and save the current system time in internal origin property. The getDelayed method calculates the actual time left before work item gets expired. The delay is external setting which comes as constructor parameter. The mandatory implementation of Comparable<Delayed> is required as Delayed extends this interface.

Now, we are mostly done! To complete the example, let's make sure that same work item won't be submitted twice to the work queue by implementing equals and hashCode (implemenation is pretty trivial and should not require any comments).

public class PostponedWorkItem implements Delayed {
    ...

    @Override
    public int hashCode() {
        final int prime = 31;

        int result = 1;
        result = prime * result + ( ( workItem == null ) ? 0 : workItem.hashCode() );

        return result;
    }

    @Override
    public boolean equals( Object obj ) {
        if( this == obj ) {
            return true;
        }

        if( obj == null ) {
            return false;
        }

        if( !( obj instanceof PostponedWorkItem ) ) {
            return false;
        }

        final PostponedWorkItem other = ( PostponedWorkItem )obj;
        if( workItem == null ) {
            if( other.workItem != null ) {
                return false;
            }
        } else if( !workItem.equals( other.workItem ) ) {
            return false;
        }

        return true;
    }
}

The last step is to introduce some kind of manager which will scheduled work items and periodically polls out expired ones: meet WorkItemScheduler class.

package com.example.delayed;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Collection;
import java.util.concurrent.BlockingQueue;
import java.util.concurrent.DelayQueue;

public class WorkItemScheduler {
    private final long delay = 2000; // 2 seconds

    private final BlockingQueue< PostponedWorkItem > delayed =
            new DelayQueue< PostponedWorkItem >(); 

    public void addWorkItem( final WorkItem workItem ) {
        final PostponedWorkItem postponed = new PostponedWorkItem( workItem, delay );
        if( !delayed.contains( postponed )) {
            delayed.offer( postponed );
        }
    }

    public void process() {
        final Collection< PostponedWorkItem > expired = new ArrayList< PostponedWorkItem >();
        delayed.drainTo( expired );

        for( final PostponedWorkItem postponed: expired ) {
            // Do some real work here with postponed.getWorkItem()
        }
    }
}

Usage of BlockingQueue guarantees thread safety and high level of concurrency. The process method should be run periodically in order to drain work items queue. It could be annotated by @Scheduled annotation from Spring Framework or by EJB's @Schedule annotation from JEE 6.

Enjoy!