I am looking for lightweight messaging framework in Java. My task is to process events in a SEDA’s manner: I know that some stages of the processing could be completed quickly, and others not, and would like to decouple these stages of processing.

Let’s say I have components A and B and processing engine (be this container or whatever else) invokes component A, which in turn invokes component B. I do not care if execution time of component B will be 2s, but I do care if execution time of component A is below 50ms, for example. Therefore, it seems most reasonable for component A to submit a message to B, which B will process at the desired time.

I am aware of different JMS implementations and Apache ActiveMQ: they are too heavyweight for this. I searched for some lightweight messaging (with really basic features like messages serialization and simplest routing) to no avail.

Do you have anything to recommend in this issue?