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Using JMS
Although ActiveMQ provides a JMS agnostic messaging API, many users will be more comfortable using JMS.
JMS is a very popular API standard for messaging, and most messaging systems provide a JMS API. If you are completely new to JMS we suggest you follow theSun JMS tutorial - a full JMS tutorial is out of scope for this guide.
ActiveMQ also ships with a wide range of examples, many of which demonstrate JMS API usage. A good place to start would be to play around with the simple JMS Queue and Topic example, but we also provide examples for many other parts of the JMS API. A full description of the examples is available in Examples.
In this section we'll go through the main steps in configuring the server for JMS and creating a simple JMS program. We'll also show how to configure and use JNDI, and also how to use JMS with ActiveMQ without using any JNDI.
A simple ordering system
For this chapter we're going to use a very simple ordering system as our example. It is a somewhat contrived example because of its extreme simplicity, but it serves to demonstrate the very basics of setting up and using JMS.
We will have a single JMS Queue called OrderQueue
, and we will have a
single MessageProducer
sending an order message to the queue and a
single MessageConsumer
consuming the order message from the queue.
The queue will be a durable
queue, i.e. it will survive a server
restart or crash. We also want to pre-deploy the queue, i.e. specify the
queue in the server JMS configuration so it is created automatically
without us having to explicitly create it from the client.
JNDI Configuration
The JMS specification establishes the convention that administered objects (i.e. JMS queue, topic and connection factory instances) are made available via the JNDI API. Brokers are free to implement JNDI as they see fit assuming the implementation fits the API. ActiveMQ does not have a JNDI server. Rather, it uses a client-side JNDI implementation that relies on special properties set in the environment to construct the appropriate JMS objects. In other words, no objects are stored in JNDI on the ActiveMQ server. There are simply instantiated on the client based on the provided configuration. Let's look at the different kinds of administered objects and how to configure them.
Note
The following configuration properties are strictly required when ActiveMQ is running in stand-alone mode. When ActiveMQ is integrated to an application server (e.g. Wildfly) the application server itself will almost certainly provide a JNDI client with its own properties.
ConnectionFactory JNDI
A JMS connection factory is used by the client to make connections to the server. It knows the location of the server it is connecting to, as well as many other configuration parameters.
By default, a javax.naming.Context
instance created using the
org.apache.activemq.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory
will
automatically have the following connection factories available for
lookup:
-
ConnectionFactory
-
XAConnectionFactory
-
QueueConnectionFactory
-
TopicConnectionFactory
Here's a simple example of the JNDI context environment for a client looking up a connection factory to access an embedded instance of ActiveMQ:
java.naming.factory.initial=org.apache.activemq.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory
It's really as simple as that. As noted previously, any JNDI context
created with the ActiveMQInitialContextFactory
will have a set of
default connection factories available. Therefore, only the
java.naming.factory.initial
property is required to access an embedded
broker.
In certain situations there could be multiple server instances running
within a particular JVM. In that situation each server would typically
have an InVM acceptor with a unique server-ID. A client using JMS and
JNDI can account for this by specifying a
javax.naming.Context.PROVIDER_URL
(String
value of
"java.naming.provider.url") in the JNDI environment like vm://2
where
2
is the server-ID for acceptor.
Here is a list of all the supported URL schemes:
-
vm
-
tcp
-
udp
-
jgroups
Most clients won't be connecting to an embedded broker. Clients will
most commonly connect across a network a remote broker. In that case the
client can use the javax.naming.Context.PROVIDER_URL
(String
value
of "java.naming.provider.url") in the JNDI environment to specify where
to connect. Here's a simple example of a client configuring a connection
factory to connect to a remote broker running on myhost:5445:
java.naming.factory.initial=org.apache.activemq.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory
java.naming.provider.url=tcp://myhost:5445
In the example above the client is using the tcp
scheme for the
provider URL. A client may also specify multiple comma-delimited
host:port combinations in the URL (e.g.
tcp://remote-host1:5445,remote-host2:5445
). Whether there is one or
many host:port combinations in the URL they are treated as the initial
connector(s) for the underlying connection.
The udp
scheme is also supported which should use an host:port
combination that matches the group-address
and group-port
from the
corresponding broadcast-group
configured on the ActiveMQ server(s).
Each scheme has a specific set of properties which can be set using the
traditional URL query string format (e.g.
scheme://host:port?key1=value1&key2=value2
) to customize the
underlying transport mechanism. For example, if a client wanted to
connect to a remote server using TCP and SSL it would use a
Context.PROVIDER_URL
of tcp://remote-host:5445?ssl-enabled=true
.
All the properties available for the tcp
scheme are described in the
documentation regarding the Netty
transport.
The udp
scheme supports 4 properties:
-
local-address
- If you are running with multiple network interfaces on the same machine, you may want to specify that the discovery group listens only only a specific interface. To do this you can specify the interface address with this parameter. -
local-port
- If you want to specify a local port to which the datagram socket is bound you can specify it here. Normally you would just use the default value of -1 which signifies that an anonymous port should be used. This parameter is always specified in conjunction withlocal-address
. -
refresh-timeout
- This is the period the discovery group waits after receiving the last broadcast from a particular server before removing that servers connector pair entry from its list. You would normally set this to a value significantly higher than the broadcast-period on the broadcast group otherwise servers might intermittently disappear from the list even though they are still broadcasting due to slight differences in timing. This parameter is optional, the default value is 10000 milliseconds (10 seconds). -
discovery-initial-wait-timeout
- If the connection factory is used immediately after creation then it may not have had enough time to received broadcasts from all the nodes in the cluster. On first usage, the connection factory will make sure it waits this long since creation before creating the first connection. The default value for this parameter is 10000 milliseconds.
Lastly, the jgroups
scheme is supported which provides an alternative
to the udp
scheme for server discovery. The URL pattern is as follows
jgroups://<jgroups-xml-conf-filename>
where
<jgroups-xml-conf-filename>
refers to an XML file on the classpath
that contains the JGroups configuration.
The refresh-timeout
and discovery-initial-wait-timeout
properties
are supported just like with udp
.
Although a javax.naming.Context
instance created using the
org.apache.activemq.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory
will
automatically have some connection factories present, it is possible for
a client to specify its own connection factories. This is done using the
org.apache.activemq.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory.CONNECTION_FACTORY_NAMES
property (String value of "connectionFactoryNames"). The value for this
property is a comma delimited String of all the connection factories the
client wishes to create. For example:
java.naming.factory.initial=org.apache.activemq.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory
java.naming.provider.url=tcp://localhost:5445
connectionFactoryNames=myConnectionFactory
In this example, the client is creating a connection factory named "myConnectionFactory." This replaces all the default connection factories so that only the "myConnectionFactory" connection factory is available to the client.
Aside from the underlying transport, the underlying connection factory
implementation can also be configured using special properties. To
configure a particular connection factory the client would follow this
pattern for the property name to set in the environment:
connection.<connection-factory-name>.<property-name>
. For example, if
the client wanted to customize the default connection factory
"ConnectionFactory" to support high-availability then it would do this:
java.naming.factory.initial=org.apache.activemq.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory
java.naming.provider.url=tcp://myhost:5445
connection.ConnectionFactory.ha=true
Any property available on the underlying
org.apache.activemq.jms.client.ActiveMQConnectionFactory
can be set
this way in addition to the ha
(boolean) and type
(String)
properties. Here are the different options for the type
:
Configuration for Connection Factory Types
type | interface |
---|---|
CF (default) | javax.jms.ConnectionFactory |
XA_CF | javax.jms.XAConnectionFactory |
QUEUE_CF | javax.jms.QueueConnectionFactory |
QUEUE_XA_CF | javax.jms.XAQueueConnectionFactory |
TOPIC_CF | javax.jms.TopicConnectionFactory |
TOPIC_XA_CF | javax.jms.XATopicConnectionFactory |
Destination JNDI
JMS destinations are also typically looked up via JNDI. As with
connection factories, destinations can be configured using special
properties in the JNDI context environment. The property name should
follow the pattern: queue.<jndi-binding>
or topic.<jndi-binding>
.
The property value should be the name of the queue hosted by the
ActiveMQ server. For example, if the server had a JMS queue configured
like so:
<queue name="OrderQueue"/>
And if the client wanted to bind this queue to "queues/OrderQueue" then the JNDI properties would be configured like so:
java.naming.factory.initial=org.apache.activemq.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory
java.naming.provider.url=tcp://myhost:5445
queue.queues/OrderQueue=OrderQueue
It is also possible to look-up JMS destinations which haven't been
configured explicitly in the JNDI context environment. This is possible
using dynamicQueues/
or dynamicTopics/
in the look-up string. For
example, if the client wanted to look-up the aforementioned "OrderQueue"
it could do so simply by using the string "dynamicQueues/OrderQueue".
Note, the text that follows dynamicQueues/
or dynamicTopics/
must
correspond exactly to the name of the destination on the server.
The code
Here's the code for the example:
First we'll create a JNDI initial context from which to lookup our JMS
objects. If the above properties are set in jndi.properties
and it is
on the classpath then any new, empty InitialContext
will be
initialized using those properties:
InitialContext ic = new InitialContext();
//Now we'll look up the connection factory from which we can create
//connections to myhost:5445:
ConnectionFactory cf = (ConnectionFactory)ic.lookup("ConnectionFactory");
//And look up the Queue:
Queue orderQueue = (Queue)ic.lookup("queues/OrderQueue");
//Next we create a JMS connection using the connection factory:
Connection connection = cf.createConnection();
//And we create a non transacted JMS Session, with AUTO\_ACKNOWLEDGE
//acknowledge mode:
Session session = connection.createSession(false, Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE);
//We create a MessageProducer that will send orders to the queue:
MessageProducer producer = session.createProducer(orderQueue);
//And we create a MessageConsumer which will consume orders from the
//queue:
MessageConsumer consumer = session.createConsumer(orderQueue);
//We make sure we start the connection, or delivery won't occur on it:
connection.start();
//We create a simple TextMessage and send it:
TextMessage message = session.createTextMessage("This is an order");
producer.send(message);
//And we consume the message:
TextMessage receivedMessage = (TextMessage)consumer.receive();
System.out.println("Got order: " + receivedMessage.getText());
It is as simple as that. For a wide range of working JMS examples please see the examples directory in the distribution.
Warning
Please note that JMS connections, sessions, producers and consumers are designed to be re-used.
It is an anti-pattern to create new connections, sessions, producers and consumers for each message you produce or consume. If you do this, your application will perform very poorly. This is discussed further in the section on performance tuning Performance Tuning.
Directly instantiating JMS Resources without using JNDI
Although it is a very common JMS usage pattern to lookup JMS Administered Objects (that's JMS Queue, Topic and ConnectionFactory instances) from JNDI, in some cases you just think "Why do I need JNDI? Why can't I just instantiate these objects directly?"
With ActiveMQ you can do exactly that. ActiveMQ supports the direct instantiation of JMS Queue, Topic and ConnectionFactory instances, so you don't have to use JNDI at all.
For a full working example of direct instantiation please see the JMS examples in ?.
Here's our simple example, rewritten to not use JNDI at all:
We create the JMS ConnectionFactory object via the ActiveMQJMSClient Utility class, note we need to provide connection parameters and specify which transport we are using, for more information on connectors please see Configuring the Transport.
TransportConfiguration transportConfiguration = new TransportConfiguration(NettyConnectorFactory.class.getName());
ConnectionFactory cf = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactoryWithoutHA(JMSFactoryType.CF,transportConfiguration);
//We also create the JMS Queue object via the ActiveMQJMSClient Utility
//class:
Queue orderQueue = ActiveMQJMSClient.createQueue("OrderQueue");
//Next we create a JMS connection using the connection factory:
Connection connection = cf.createConnection();
//And we create a non transacted JMS Session, with AUTO\_ACKNOWLEDGE
//acknowledge mode:
Session session = connection.createSession(false, Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE);
//We create a MessageProducer that will send orders to the queue:
MessageProducer producer = session.createProducer(orderQueue);
//And we create a MessageConsumer which will consume orders from the
//queue:
MessageConsumer consumer = session.createConsumer(orderQueue);
//We make sure we start the connection, or delivery won't occur on it:
connection.start();
//We create a simple TextMessage and send it:
TextMessage message = session.createTextMessage("This is an order");
producer.send(message);
//And we consume the message:
TextMessage receivedMessage = (TextMessage)consumer.receive();
System.out.println("Got order: " + receivedMessage.getText());
Setting The Client ID
This represents the client id for a JMS client and is needed for
creating durable subscriptions. It is possible to configure this on the
connection factory and can be set via the client-id
element. Any
connection created by this connection factory will have this set as its
client id.
Setting The Batch Size for DUPS_OK
When the JMS acknowledge mode is set to DUPS_OK
it is possible to
configure the consumer so that it sends acknowledgements in batches
rather that one at a time, saving valuable bandwidth. This can be
configured via the connection factory via the dups-ok-batch-size
element and is set in bytes. The default is 1024 * 1024 bytes = 1 MiB.
Setting The Transaction Batch Size
When receiving messages in a transaction it is possible to configure the
consumer to send acknowledgements in batches rather than individually
saving valuable bandwidth. This can be configured on the connection
factory via the transaction-batch-size
element and is set in bytes.
The default is 1024 * 1024.