JMS in Enterprise Applications

JMS is an ideal platform for developing and deploying a wide variety of distributed enterprise applications. JMS can also be used as an alternative to traditional synchronous solutions and provides a much better solution than Java/RMI or CORBA (see the section later "Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Systems").

A lot of enterprise scenarios out in the market place today rely on too much overhead from object brokerage and the all-or-nothing resource-intensive transactions. These could be more streamlined using JMS to notify other processes of impending updates.

Some of the areas in which JMS is useful are detailed below:

• Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

  To achieve a competitive advantage, enterprises have to integrate information stored in multiple databases and applications. Connecting each individual system to each other system takes a lot of time and is also very expensive. JMS, with its platform-independence, asynchronous communication API, guaranteed-message delivery, and fault-tolerance, offers an ideal solution for a number of application integration requirements.

• Collaboration

  Collaborative computing, where users share a wide range of resources, from spreadsheets and presentations to entire web sites, is catching on fast in the corporate world. But successful online collaboration requires workflow automation software to ensure that the shared content is properly managed. Collaboration applications, which require fast, secure exchange of information and data within individual departments and across the enterprise, will find JMS solutions extremely useful. Collaboration solutions based on JMS work across any network, and scale smoothly as new users are added.

• Secure and Fault-tolerant Guaranteed Message Delivery

  For a number of enterprise applications, the critical requirement is not raw speed but absolute reliability and guaranteed delivery under faulty network conditions (which occur for instance over the Internet). JMS provides an ideal base for such systems. Publishers can keep publishing messages to the local destination whether the network is connected or not. When the network comes up again, the local server may automatically forward all pending messages to the remote JMS servers to which it is connected. This automatic store-and-forward mechanism saves developers a lot of time and effort, allowing them to focus more on application requirements rather than on the internal plumbing of the messaging server.

• Business-to-Business (B2B) E-Commerce

  B2B involves two-way exchange of information between businesses. JMS facilitates B2B e-commerce between businesses and suppliers over the Internet. With built-in support for standards-based Publish/Subscribe, queuing, guaranteed message delivery, and automatic message logging, JMS is an ideal platform for developing and deploying such applications.

The human-to-human factor is not to be entirely overlooked either. Workflow architectures that require critical data being propagated to different departments and RDBMS systems can certainly benefit from a JMS-based model. Administrators could for instance monitor some kind of data approval application, and get the latest "messages" on which entries need approval. This notion can be extended to DBA and systems administration in general, for which most notification systems are glorified dialog boxes or e-mails that lack JMS's ability to have interactive application actions and further enterprise responses tied to the message itself, and lack the ability of JMS messages to interact directly with these systems.