Picking Your Provider

Choosing which kind of provider to use can be a difficult decision, but in most cases following a few simple steps can make the decision easier.

First, it's perfectly acceptable to use a different provider for development and productionjust be sure to test on the production provider during development. In most cases Oracle 10g AS JMS will prove the best choice for development. Oracle 10g AS JMS is fast and simple to configure, making it an ideal proposition for developers who would rather focus on coding than on wrestling with their development environment. Another reason for using Oracle 10g AS JMS for development is that it can be configured and monitored in isolation. Using Oracle JMS for development means that somebody has to install and administer the Oracle instance used for AQ.

Choosing which provider to use for production is more difficult, however, in some cases your environment may have already made the decision for you. For example, if you're using Oracle 10g AS on top of a database other than Oracle then you can automatically rule out the use of Oracle JMS. Furthermore, many systems are built on top of existing infrastructure that may include a substantial investment in messaging techniques. If this is the case then it's often wise, from a business point of view, to use the messaging infrastructure already in place, especially if you'll be integrating with existing applications.

When choosing between Oracle 10g AS JMS and Oracle JMS, look at your performance, reliability, management, and integration needs. If your application only uses messaging internally and persistence isn't important, then Oracle 10g AS JMS is your fastest option. However, if you're using persistence, this performance difference disappears and Oracle JMS provides far more in terms of reliability, ease of backup, and management.

Like other external providers, Oracle JMS is also very useful when you want to use messaging as a mechanism for interacting with other applications, especially those written in languages other than Java. Because Oracle JMS sits on top of AQ, you can use any AQ client library to access the messages sent to Oracle JMS from your application. This has many benefits. Let's say you have an application that you want to save data to the database and queue off a message to another source. You can either queue the message in your JDBC call or use a trigger or stored procedure. The big advantage to this over an external message provider is that you know for sure that you don't queue a message if it doesn't get in your database and vice versa. You also have the ability to make take a point-in-time backup and be guaranteed through Oracle's facilities to have perfect synchronization.