AMQ Core Protocol JMS supports the following industry-recognized standards and network protocols:

AMQ Core Protocol JMS supports the OS and language versions listed below. For more information, see Red Hat AMQ 7 Supported Configurations.

AMQ Core Protocol JMS is supported in combination with the latest version of AMQ Broker.

This section introduces the core API entities and describes how they operate together.

AMQ Core Protocol JMS sends and receives messages. Messages are transferred between connected peers using message producers and consumers. Producers and consumers are established over sessions. Sessions are established over connections. Connections are created by connection factories.

A sending peer creates a producer to send messages. The producer has a destination that identifies a target queue or topic at the remote peer. A receiving peer creates a consumer to receive messages. Like the producer, the consumer has a destination that identifies a source queue or topic at the remote peer.

A destination is either a queue or a topic. In JMS, queues and topics are client-side representations of named broker entities that hold messages.

A queue implements point-to-point semantics. Each message is seen by only one consumer, and the message is removed from the queue after it is read. A topic implements publish-subscribe semantics. Each message is seen by multiple consumers, and the message remains available to other consumers after it is read.

See the JMS tutorial for more information.

The sudo command

In this document, sudo is used for any command that requires root privileges. Exercise caution when using sudo because any changes can affect the entire system. For more information about sudo, see Using the sudo command.

File paths

In this document, all file paths are valid for Linux, UNIX, and similar operating systems (for example, /home/andrea). On Microsoft Windows, you must use the equivalent Windows paths (for example, C:\Users\andrea).

Variable text

This document contains code blocks with variables that you must replace with values specific to your environment. Variable text is enclosed in arrow braces and styled as italic monospace. For example, in the following command, replace <project-dir> with the value for your environment:

$ cd <project-dir>

Configure your Maven environment to download the client library from the Red Hat Maven repository.

The client is now available in your Maven project.

As an alternative to the online repository, AMQ Core Protocol JMS can be installed to your local filesystem as a file-based Maven repository.

The example creates a consumer and producer for a queue named exampleQueue. It sends a text message and then receives it back, printing the received message to the console.

For example, running it on Linux results in the following output:

$ java -cp "target/classes:target/dependency/*" org.apache.activemq.artemis.jms.example.QueueExample
Sent message: This is a text message
Received message: This is a text message

The source code for the example is in the <install-dir>/examples/features/standard/queue/src directory. Additional examples are available in the <install-dir>/examples/features/standard directory.

JMS applications use a JNDI InitialContext object obtained from an InitialContextFactory to look up JMS objects such as the connection factory. AMQ Core Protocol JMS provides an implementation of the InitialContextFactory in the org.apache.activemq.artemis.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory class.

The InitialContextFactory implementation is discovered when the InitialContext object is instantiated:

javax.naming.Context context = new javax.naming.InitialContext();

To find an implementation, JNDI must be configured in your environment. There are two main ways of achieving this, using a jndi.properties file or using a system property.

Using a jndi.properties file

Create a file named jndi.properties and place it on the Java classpath. Add a property with the key java.naming.factory.initial.

java.naming.factory.initial = org.apache.activemq.artemis.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory

In Maven-based projects, the jndi.properties file is placed in the <project-dir>/src/main/resources directory.

Using a system property

Set the java.naming.factory.initial system property.

$ java -Djava.naming.factory.initial=org.apache.activemq.artemis.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory ...

The JMS connection factory is the entry point for creating connections. It uses a connection URI that encodes your application-specific configuration settings.

To set the factory name and connection URI, create a property in the format below. You can store this configuration in a jndi.properties file or set the corresponding system property.

connectionFactory.<factory-name> = <connection-uri>

For example, this is how you might configure a factory named app1:

connectionFactory.app1 = tcp://example.net:61616?clientID=backend

You can then use the JNDI context to look up your configured connection factory using the name app1:

ConnectionFactory factory = (ConnectionFactory) context.lookup("app1");

A connection factory is configured using a connection URI in the following format:

tcp://<host>:<port>[?<option>=<value>[&<option>=<value>...]]

For example, the following is a connection URI that connects to host example.net at port 61616 and sets the client ID to backend:

tcp://example.net:61616?clientID=backend

Failover URIs take the following form:

(<connection-uri>[,<connection-uri>])[?<option>=<value>[&<option>=<value>...]]

The available connection options are described in the following sections.

The client can enable large message support by setting a value for the property minLargeMessageSize. Any message larger than minLargeMessageSize is considered a large message.

A client can receive information about all master and slave brokers, so that in the event of a connection failure, it can reconnect to the slave broker. The slave broker then automatically re-creates any sessions and consumers that existed on each connection before failover. This feature saves you from having to hand-code manual reconnection logic in your applications.

When a session is recreated on the slave, it does not have any knowledge of messages already sent or acknowledged. Any in-flight sends or acknowledgements at the time of failover might also be lost. However, even without transparent failover, it is simple to guarantee once and only once delivery, even in the case of failure, by using a combination of duplicate detection and retrying of transactions.

Clients detect connection failure when they have not received packets from the broker within a configurable period of time. See Section 5.3, “Detecting dead connections” for more information.

You have a number of methods to configure clients to receive information about master and slave. One option is to configure clients to connect to a specific broker and then receive information about the other brokers in the cluster. See Section 5.7, “Configuring static discovery” for more information. The most common way, however, is to use broker discovery. For details on how to configure broker discovery, see Section 5.6, “Configuring dynamic discovery”.

Also, you can configure the client by adding parameters to the query string of the URI used to connect to the broker, as in the example below.

connectionFactory.ConnectionFactory=tcp://localhost:61616?ha=true&reconnectAttempts=3

In some cases you might not want automatic client failover, but prefer to code your own reconnection logic in a failure handler instead. This is known as application-level failover, since the failover is handled at the application level.

To implement application-level failover when using JMS, set an ExceptionListener class on the JMS connection. The ExceptionListener is called by the broker in the event that a connection failure is detected. In your ExceptionListener, you should close your old JMS connections. You might also want to look up new connection factory instances from JNDI and create new connections.

As long as the it is receiving data from the broker, the client considers a connection to be alive. Configure the client to check its connection for failure by providing a value for the client-failure-check-period property. The default check period for a network connection is 30000 milliseconds, or 30 seconds, while the default value for an In-VM connection, is -1, which means the client never fails the connection from its side if no data is received.

Typically, you set the check period to be much lower than the value used for the broker’s connection time-to-live, which ensures that clients can reconnect in case of a temporary failure.

The examples below show how to set the check period to 10000 milliseconds, or 10 seconds.

By default clients can set a time-to-live (TTL) for their own connections. The examples below show you how to set the TTL.

A client application must close its resources in a controlled manner before it exits to prevent dead connections from occurring. In Java, it is recommended to close connections inside a finally block:

Connection jmsConnection = null;
try {
   ConnectionFactory jmsConnectionFactory = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactoryWithoutHA(...);
   jmsConnection = jmsConnectionFactory.createConnection();
   ...use the connection...
}
finally {
   if (jmsConnection != null) {
      jmsConnection.close();
   }
}

You can configure AMQ Core Protocol JMS to discover a list of brokers when attempting to establish a connection.

If you are using JNDI on the client to look up your JMS connection factory instances, you can specify these parameters in the JNDI context environment. Typically the parameters are defined in a file named jndi.properties. The host and part in the URI for the connection factory should match the group-address and group-port from the corresponding broadcast-group inside broker’s broker.xml configuration file. Below is an example of a jndi.properties file configured to connect to a broker’s discovery group.

java.naming.factory.initial = ActiveMQInitialContextFactory
connectionFactory.myConnectionFactory=udp://231.7.7.7:9876

When this connection factory is downloaded from JNDI by a client application and JMS connections are created from it, those connections will be load-balanced across the list of servers that the discovery group maintains by listening on the multicast address specified in the broker’s discovery group configuration.

As an alternative to using JNDI, you can use specify the discovery group parameters directly in your Java code when creating the JMS connection factory. The code below provides an example of how to do this.

final String groupAddress = "231.7.7.7";
final int groupPort = 9876;

DiscoveryGroupConfiguration discoveryGroupConfiguration = new DiscoveryGroupConfiguration();
UDPBroadcastEndpointFactory udpBroadcastEndpointFactory = new UDPBroadcastEndpointFactory();
udpBroadcastEndpointFactory.setGroupAddress(groupAddress).setGroupPort(groupPort);
discoveryGroupConfiguration.setBroadcastEndpointFactory(udpBroadcastEndpointFactory);

ConnectionFactory jmsConnectionFactory = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactoryWithHA
    (discoveryGroupConfiguration, JMSFactoryType.CF);

Connection jmsConnection1 = jmsConnectionFactory.createConnection();
Connection jmsConnection2 = jmsConnectionFactory.createConnection();

The refresh timeout can be set directly on the DiscoveryGroupConfiguration by using the setter method setRefreshTimeout(). The default value is 10000 milliseconds.

On first usage, the connection factory will make sure it waits this long since creation before creating the first connection. The default wait time is 10000 milliseconds, but you can change it by passing a new value to DiscoveryGroupConfiguration.setDiscoveryInitialWaitTimeout().

Sometimes it may be impossible to use UDP on the network you are using. In this case you can configure a connection with an initial list of possible servers. The list can be just one broker that you know will always be available, or a list of brokers where at least one will be available.

This does not mean that you have to know where all your servers are going to be hosted. You can configure these servers to use the reliable servers to connect to. After they are connected, their connection details will be propagated from the server to the client.

If you are using JNDI on the client to look up your JMS connection factory instances, you can specify these parameters in the JNDI context environment. Typically the parameters are defined in a file named jndi.properties. Below is an example jndi.properties file that provides a static list of brokers instead of using dynamic discovery.

java.naming.factory.initial=org.apache.activemq.artemis.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory
connectionFactory.myConnectionFactory=(tcp://myhost:61616,tcp://myhost2:61616)

When the above connection factory is used by a client, its connections will be load-balanced across the list of brokers defined within the parentheses ().

If you are instantiating the JMS connection factory directly, you can specify the connector list explicitly when creating the JMS connection factory, as in the example below.

HashMap<String, Object> map = new HashMap<String, Object>();
map.put("host", "myhost");
map.put("port", "61616");
TransportConfiguration broker1 = new TransportConfiguration
    (NettyConnectorFactory.class.getName(), map);

HashMap<String, Object> map2 = new HashMap<String, Object>();
map2.put("host", "myhost2");
map2.put("port", "61617");
TransportConfiguration broker2 = new TransportConfiguration
    (NettyConnectorFactory.class.getName(), map2);

ActiveMQConnectionFactory cf = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactoryWithHA
    (JMSFactoryType.CF, broker1, broker2);

To write to a large message, use the BytesMessage.writeBytes() method. The following example reads bytes from a file and writes them to a message:

BytesMessage message = session.createBytesMessage();
File inputFile = new File(inputFilePath);
InputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream(inputFile);

int numRead;
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];

while ((numRead = inputStream.read(buffer, 0, buffer.length)) != -1) {
    message.writeBytes(buffer, 0, numRead);
}

To read from a large message, use the BytesMessage.readBytes() method. The following example reads bytes from a message and writes them to a file:

BytesMessage message = (BytesMessage) consumer.receive();
File outputFile = new File(outputFilePath);
OutputStream outputStream = new FileOutputStream(outputFile);

int numRead;
byte buffer[] = new byte[1024];

for (int pos = 0; pos < message.getBodyLength(); pos += buffer.length) {
    numRead = message.readBytes(buffer);
    outputStream.write(buffer, 0, numRead);
}