Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler))

by Hohpe Gregor

So, how do you get around this? One approach is to limit your application so it never needs to transfer more data than the messaging layer can store in a single message. This is an arbitrary limit, though, which can prevent your application from producing the desired functionality. If the large amount of data is the result of a request, the caller could issue multiple requests, one for each result chunk, but that increases network traffic and assumes the caller even knows how many result chunks will be needed. The receiver could listen for data chunks until there are no more (but how does it know there aren’t any more?) and then try to figure out how to reassemble the chunks into the original, large piece of data, but that would be error-prone.