Spring 3.2 @Async task with return type of Future

Check out this blog post.

Important configuration is:

1. @Async on Spring managed bean method.
2. Enable async in Spring config XML by defining:

<!-- 
    Enables the detection of @Async and @Scheduled annotations
    on any Spring-managed object.
-->
<task:annotation-driven />

SimpleAsyncTaskExecutor will be used by default.

Wrap the response in a Future<> object.

---

Example

@Async
public Future<PublishAndReturnDocumentResult> generateDocument(FooBarBean bean) {  
    // do some logic  
    return new AsyncResult<PublishAndReturnDocumentResult>(result);
}

You can then check if the result is done using result.isDone() or wait to get the response result.get().

Check out this blog post.

Using @Async allows you to run a computation in a method asynchronously. This means that if it's called (on a Spring managed bean), the control is immediately returned to the caller and the code in the method is run in another thread. The caller receives a Future object that is bound to the running computation and can use it to check if the computation is running and/or wait for the result.

Creating such a method is simple. Annotate it with @Async and wrap the result in AsyncResult, as shown in the blog post.