Programming message services in Java

Asynchronous interactions seem to be the way of the future

Publish destinations

How a destination is published is message service dependent. In the case of the JBossMQ message server a destination can be published by providing an entry in the JBossmq-destinations-service.xml file (found under the \server\default\deploy\jms directory for the default Jboss server configuration). By default a number of queues are already defined and we will use one of these, the queue/testQueue. By contrast, in WebLogic and WebSphere queues can be defined using the application server consoles.

The entry for the JBossmq-destinations-service.xml file for the queue/testQueue is presented below:

  <mbean code="org.jboss.mq.server.jmx.Queue"
         name="jboss.mq.destination:service=Queue,name=testQueue">
    <depends optional-attribute-name="DestinationManager">jboss.mq:service=DestinationManager</depends>
    <depends optional-attribute-name="SecurityManager">jboss.mq:service=SecurityManager</depends>
    <attribute name="MessageCounterHistoryDayLimit">-1</attribute>
    <attribute name="SecurityConf">
      <security>
        <role name="guest" read="true" write="true"/>
        <role name="publisher" read="true" write="true" create="false"/>
        <role name="noacc" read="false" write="false" create="false"/>
      </security>
    </attribute>
  </mbean>

Define a client

To send a message to a JMS message server queue, there are a number of steps that must be performed. These steps are the same whether you wish to send the message from a stand-alone application, from a Servlet or JSP, or indeed from an Enterprise JavaBean. These steps are:

Step 1: Obtain a queue connection factory. A queue connection factory is used to create the queue connection object used to handle the connection to the message servers’ queue.

Step 2: Create a queue connection. This is done by calling the createQueueConnection method on the factory object just obtained.

Step 3: Create a queue session. A queue session is obtained from the queue connection, as illustrated below:

QueueSession qs = 
             qc.createQueueSession(false, 
             Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE);

The first argument to the createQueueSession method above indicates that this is not part of a transaction. The second argument indicates that the queue session automatically acknowledges messages when they have been received successfully. Until a JMS message has been acknowledged, it is not considered to be successfully consumed.

Step 4: Look up the queue. This is done by using the initial context object we created earlier and looking up the queue using its JNDI name (e.g. queue/testQueue).

Step 5: Create a queue sender. A queue sender is a message producer that allows messages to be sent to the specified queue. A queue sender is created using the createSender method on the queue session:

Step 6: Create the message object.

Step 7: Send the message via the QueueSender object created in step 5.

Step 8: Close the queue connection.