Does NServiceBus have a use in Web/MVC4 + SQL architecture?
ajax, asp.net, asp.net-mvc-3, nservicebus
Solution
NServiceBus fits in quite nicely with any web front-end. You are just going to need to be aware of how asynchronous message processing affects your UI. In most instances one could simply indicate to the user that the request has been accepted and will be processed. But in other cases you may need to forgo eventual consistency for immediately consistent.
For instance, for user registration I typically check availability of the user name and then register the user immediately but I send a command to e-mail the activation message so that the user does not have to wait for that. The user will eventually receive their e-mail. So a message is displayed indicating that an e-mail will be sent and that they need to click the activation link even though the mail may only be sent in 5 minutes.
Another example is an application where the user could convert various document formats to TIFF. The request would be sent and the web front-end would poll to wait for the result of the conversion and then display the converted pages.
So it is going to affect how your UI/UX works. It is definitely still useful and in some instances makes your life a whole lot easier.
In my case I used my FOSS Shuttle Service Bus: http://shuttle.codeplex.com/ --- but the concepts apply anyway.
Problem
Given that the web is a very one-way synchronous architecture, is there any benefit to an NSB-enabled web application using MVC4? I love the fault tolerance and ease of development that comes with NSB, but since the technology is all about one-way asynchronous messaging, how can I design my application around it in such a way that the user doesn't (often) notice their commands not being complete by the time a postback occurs? What paradigm should I adopt in designing my UI to naturally fit the curvature of NServiceBus? Indeed, it seems NSB is an unnecessary complexity between a website and its SQL store because users always assume the "work" is done when their browser is done refreshing. Am I wrong in this regard? Edit: I've seen other solutions whereby each command handler publishes an event when the work is done by the NSB service, and that event handlers on the ASP.NET project will create "stub files" that a Java-script enabled page is constantly polling to indicate that an operation completed. Is this the only way to bridge the gap between one way sync and async platforms?