Chapter 6: Configuring Java Message Service

Overview

In the fast-moving world of technology, in which technologies come in and out of fashion, enterprise messaging has enjoyed a long and successful life. Enterprise messaging simplifies the process of inter-application communication, especially across platform boundaries, and it provides an excellent mechanism for systems integration, legacy or otherwise . Another common use of enterprise messaging is to provide asynchronous execution of code, something that's especially useful for executing long-running processes without the need to keep the user waiting around. Finally JMS is also quite useful for replicating data in a distributed environment, however, in most cases your relational database management system (RDBMS) will have much better support for this than JMS and will require less effort to set up.

JMS provides a standard API to access enterprise messaging resources, allowing your application to leverage the power of messaging without having to worry about vendor-specific implementations .

In this chapter we take a detailed look at JMS support in Oracle 10g AS. We'll show you how to configure the server, build a sample application to test your configuration, and use the JMS management tools for practical purposes. We won't cover every single parameter and property that can be set, because this is provided in excellent detail in the documentation. However, we'll point out those properties that sometimes cause confusion, or those places where you may want to consider changing the default setting.

This chapter is split into two main parts . The first part covers Oracle Application Server JMS, the default JMS implementation used by Oracle 10g AS. The second part of the chapter looks at the use of additional JMS providers via the Resource Provider extension mechanism. Specifically, this section will cover Oracle JMS and SonicMQ.

You should note that this chapter assumes an understanding of the JMS API and basic concepts of messaging. Wherever possible we'll explain JMS-specific topics as best as we can, but if there's something you don't understand then we recommend Richard Monson-Haefel and Dave Chappell's superb Java Message Service (O'Reilly & Associates, 2000).