A few months ago I did a deep dive into Efficient Lightweight JMS with Spring and ActiveMQ where I focused on the details for asynchronous sending and receiving of messages. In an ideal world all messaging would be asynchronous. If you need a response then you should set up an asynchronous listener and either have enough state stored in the service or in the message that you can continue processing once the response has been received. However, when ideals lead to complexity, we have to make the decision of how much complexity can we tolerate for the performance we need. Sometimes it just makes more sense to use a synchronous request/response.