Designing an enterprise application to use JMS

 

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This topic describes things to consider when designing an enterprise application to use the JMS API directly for asynchronous messaging.

 

Overview

This topic describes things to consider when designing an enterprise application to use the JMS API directly for asynchronous messaging.

 

Procedure

• For messaging operations, you should write application programs that use only references to the interfaces defined in Sun's javax.jms package. JMS defines a generic view of a messaging that maps onto the underlying transport. An enterprise application that uses JMS, makes use of the following interfaces that are defined in Sun's javax.jms package:

  Connection

  Provides access to the underlying transport, and is used to create Sessions.

  Session

  Provides a context for producing and consuming messages, including the methods used to create MessageProducers and MessageConsumers.

  MessageProducer

  Used to send messages.

  MessageConsumer

  Used to receive messages.

  The generic JMS interfaces are subclassed into the following more specific versions for Point-to-Point and Publish/Subscribe behavior:

  JMS Common Interfaces	Point-to-Point	Publish/Subscribe
  ConnectionFactory	QueueConnectionFactory	TopicConnectionFactory
  Connection	QueueConnection	TopicConnection
  Destination	Queue	Topic
  Session	QueueSession,	TopicSession,
  MessageProducer	QueueSender	TopicPublisher
  MessageConsumer	QueueReceiver, QueueBrowser	TopicSubscriber

  For more information about using these JMS interfaces, see the JMS Documentation and the WebSphere MQ Use Java book, SC34-5456. The section "JMS Requirements" of the J2EE specification gives a list of methods that must not be called in Web and EJB containers:

        
       javax.jms.Session method setMessageListener
        javax.jms.Session method getMessageListener
        javax.jms.Session method run
        javax.jms.QueueConnection method createConnectionConsumer
        javax.jms.TopicConnection method createConnectionConsumer
        javax.jms.TopicConnection method createDurableConnectionConsumer
        javax.jms.MessageConsumer method getMessageListener
        javax.jms.MessageConsumer method setMessageListener
        javax.jms.Connection setExceptionListener
        javax.jms.Connection stop
        javax.jms.Connection setClientID
  
  

  This method restriction is enforced in IBM WebSphere Application Server by throwing a javax.jms.IllegalStateException.

• Applications refer to JMS resources that are predefined, as administered objects, to WAS.

  Details of JMS resources that are used by enterprise applications are defined to WebSphere Application Server and bound into the JNDI namespace by the WebSphere administrative support. An enterprise application can retrieve these objects from the JNDI namespace and use them without needing to know anything about their implementation. This enables the underlying messaging architecture defined by the JMS resources to be changed without requiring changes to the enterprise application. When designing an enterprise application, identify the details of the following types of JMS resources:

  Point-to-Point	Publish/Subscribe
  ConnectionFactory (or QueueConnectionFactory) Queue	ConnectionFactory (or TopicConnectionFactory) Topic

  A connection factory is used to create connections from the JMS provider to the messaging system, and encapsulates the configuration parameters needed to create connections.

  For more information about the properties of these JMS resources, see Configure JMS provider resources.

• The appserver pools connections and sessions with the JMS provider to improve performance. We need to configure the connection and session pool properties appropriately for your applications, otherwise you may not get the connection and session behavior that you want.

• Applications can cache JMS connections, sessions, and producers or consumers. Due to the pooling mentioned above this may not give as much of a performance improvement as you might expect.

  You must not cache session handles in stateless session beans that operate in transactions started by a client of the bean. Caching handles in this way causes the bean to be returned to the pool while the session is still involved in the transaction. Also, you should not cache non-durable subscribers due to the restriction mentioned above.

• A non-durable subscriber can only be used in the same transactional context (for example, a global transaction or an unspecified transaction context) that existed when the subscriber was created. For more information about this context restriction, see The effect of transaction context on non-durable subscribers.

• Use durable subscriptions with the default messaging provider. A durable subscription on a JMS topic enables a subscriber to receive a copy of all messages published to that topic, even after periods of time when the subscriber is not connected to the server. Therefore, subscriber applications can operate disconnected from the server for long periods of time, and then reconnect to the server and process messages that were published during their absence. If an application creates a durable subscription, it is added to the runtime list that administrators can display and act on through the console.Each durable subscription is given a unique identifier, clientID##subName where:

  clientID

  The client identifier used to associate a connection and its objects with the messages maintained for applications (as clients of the JMS provider). You should use a naming convention that helps you identify the applications, in case relate durable subscriptions to the associated applications for runtime administration.

  subName

  The subscription name used to uniquely identify a durable subscription within a given client identifier.

  For durable subscriptions created by message-driven beans, these values are set on the JMS activationSpec. For other durable subscriptions, the client identifier is set on the JMS connection factory, and the subscription name is set by the application on the createDurableSubscriber operation.

  To create a durable subscription to a topic, an application uses the createDurableSubscriber operation defined in the JMS API:

  public TopicSubscriber createDurableSubscriber(Topic topic,
                              java.lang.String subName,
                              java.lang.String messageSelector,
                              boolean noLocal)
                              throws JMSException
  
  

  topic

  The name of the JMS topic to subscribe to. This is the name of an object supporting the javax.jms.Topic interfaces, such as found by looking up a suitable JNDI entry.

  subName

  The name used to identify this subscription.

  messageSelector

  Only messages with properties matching the message selector expression are delivered to consumers. A value of null or an empty string indicates that all messages should be delivered.

  noLocal

  If set to true, this prevents the delivery of messages published on the same connection as the durable subscriber.

  Applications can use a two argument form of createDurableSubscriber that takes only topic and subName parameters. This alternative call directly invokes the four argument version shown above, but sets messageSelector to null (so all messages are delivered) and sets noLocal to false (so messages published on the connection are delivered). For example, to create a durable subscription to the topic called myTopic, with the subscription name of mySubscription:

  session.createDurableSubscriber(myTopic,"mySubscription");
  

  If the createDurableSubscription operation fails, it throws a JMS exception that provides a message and linked exception to give more detail about the cause of the problem.

  To delete a durable subscription, an application uses the unsubscribe operation defined in the JMS API

  In normal operation there can be at most one active (connected) subscriber for a durable subscription at a time. However, the subscriber application can be running in a cloned appserver, for failover and load balancing purposes. In this case the "one active subscriber" restriction is lifted to provide a shared durable subscription that can have multiple simultaneous consumers.

  For more information about application use of durable subscriptions, see the section "Using Durable Subscriptions" in the JMS specification.

• Decide what message selectors are needed. You can use the JMS message selector mechanism to select a subset of the messages on a queue so that this subset is returned by a receive call. The selector can refer to fields in the JMS message header and fields in the message properties.

• Acting on messages received. When a message is received, you can act on it as needed by the business logic of the application. Some general JMS actions are to check that the message is of the correct type and extract the content of the message. To extract the content from the body of the message, cast from the generic Message class (which is the declared return type of the receive methods) to the more specific subclass, such as TextMessage. It is good practice always to test the message class before casting, so that unexpected errors can be handled gracefully.

  In this example, the instanceof operator is used to check that the message received is of the TextMessage type. The message content is then extracted by casting to the TextMessage subclass.

          if ( inMessage instanceof TextMessage )
  ...
      String replyString = ((TextMessage) inMessage).getText();
  
  

• JMS applications using the default messaging provider can access, without any restrictions, the content of messages received from WAS V5 embedded messaging or WebSphere MQ.

• JMS applications can access the full set of JMS_IBM* properties. These properties are of value to JMS applications that use resources provided by the default messaging provider, the V5 default messaging provider, or the WebSphere MQ provider.

  For messages handled by WebSphere MQ, the JMS_IBM* properties are mapped to equivalent WebSphere MQ Message Descriptor (MQMD) fields. For more information about the JMS_IBM* properties and MQMD fields, see the WebSphere MQ: Using Java book, SC34-6066.

• JMS applications can use report messages as a form of managed request/response processing, to give remote feedback to producers on the outcome of their send operations and the fate of their messages. JMS applications can request a full range of report options using JMS_IBM_Report_Xxxx message properties. For more information about using JMS report messages, see JMS report messages.

• JMS applications can use the JMS_IBM_Report_Discard_Msg property to control how a request message is disposed of if it cannot be delivered to the destination queue.

  MQRO_Dead_Letter_Queue

  This is the default. The request message should be written to the dead letter queue.

  MQRO_Discard

  The request message should be discarded. This is usually used in conjunction with MQRO_Exception_With_Full_Data to return an undeliverable request message to its sender.

• Use a listener to receive messages asynchronously. In a client, not in a servlet or enterprise bean, an alternative to making calls to QueueReceiver.receive() is to register a method that is called automatically when a suitable message is available; for example:

  ...
  MyClass listener =new MyClass();
  queueReceiver.setMessageListener(listener);
  //application continues with other application-specific behavior.
  ...
  

  When a message is available, it is retrieved by the onMessage() method on the listener object.

  import javax.jms.*; public class MyClass implements MessageListener
  { public void onMessage(Message message)
  {
  System.out.println("message is "+message);
  //application specific processing here
  ...
  
  }
  }
  

  For asynchronous message delivery, the application code cannot catch exceptions raised by failures to receive messages. This is because the application code does not make explicit calls to receive() methods. To cope with this situation, you can register an ExceptionListener, which is an instance of a class that implements the onException()method. When an error occurs, this method is called with the JMSException passed as its only parameter.

  For more details about using listeners to receive messages asynchronously, see the JMS Documentation.

  An alternative to developing your own JMS listener class, you can use a message-driven bean, as described in Programming with message-driven beans.

• To use authentication with WebSphere MQ or the Version 5 Embedded Messaging support, you cannot have user IDs longer than 12 characters. For example, the default Windows NT user ID, administrator, is not valid for use with WebSphere internal messaging, because it contains 13 characters.

• The following points, as defined in the EJB specification, apply to the use of flags on createxxxSession calls:

  • The transacted flag passed on createxxxSession is ignored inside a global transaction and all work is performed as part of the transaction. Outside of a transaction the transacted flag is used and, if set to true, the application should use session.commit() and session.rollback() to control the completion of the work. In an EJB2.0 module, if the transacted flag is set to true and outside of an XA transaction, then the session is involved in the WebSphere local transaction and the unresolved action attribute of the method applies to the JMS work if it is not committed or rolled back by the application.

  • Clients cannot use using Message.acknowledge() to acknowledge messages. If a value of CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE is passed on the createxxxSession call, then messages are automatically acknowledged by the appserver and Message.acknowledge() is not used.

• If you want your application to use WebSphere MQ as an external JMS provider, then send messages within a container-managed transaction.

  When you use WebSphere MQ as an external JMS provider, messages sent within a user-managed transaction can arrive before the transaction commits. This occurs only when you use WebSphere MQ as an external JMS provider, and you send messages to a WebSphere MQ queue within a user-managed transaction. The message arrives on the destination queue before the transaction commits.

  The cause of this problem is that the WebSphere MQ resource manager has not been enlisted in the user-managed transaction.

  The solution is to use a container-managed transaction.

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The effect of transaction context on non-durable subscribers
JMS report messages

 

Related concepts

JMS interfaces - explicit polling for messages

 

Related tasks

Developing a J2EE application to use JMS
Deploying a J2EE application to use JMS
Programming to use JMS and messaging directly