Porting WebLogic JMS Applications

Porting WebLogic JMS Applications

The following sections describe how to port your WebLogic JMS applications to a newer version of WebLogic Server:
Existing Feature Functionality Changes
Porting Existing Applications
Deleting JDBC Database Stores

Existing Feature Functionality Changes

Changes in existing feature functionality have been made in order to comply with Sun Microsystems' JMS Specification. Therefore, you should check feature functionality changes in the following tables before beginning any porting procedures:
Existing Feature 5.1 to 6.0 Functionality Changes
Existing Feature 6.0 to 6.1 Functionality Changes

Existing Feature 5.1 to 6.0 Functionality Changes

The following table lists the changes in existing feature functionality from WebLogic Server version 5.1, and also indicates any code changes that might be required as a result. For additional information pertaining to the JMS Specification's version change history, refer to Chapter 11, "Change History" in the specification.

Category

Description

Code Modification
Connection Factories Two default connection factories have been deprecated. The JNDI names for these factories are:
javax.jms.QueueConnectionFactory

javax.jms.TopicConnectionFactory
For backwards compatibility, the JNDI names for these two connection factories are still defined and supported.
WebLogic JMS 6.x or later defines one connection factory, by default: weblogic.jms.ConnectionFactoryYou can also specify user-defined connection factories using the Administration Console.
Note: Using the default connection factories, you have no control over the WebLogic server on which the connection factory may be deployed. However, you can can enable and/or disable the default connection factories on a per WebLogic Server basis. To deploy a connection factory on a particular WebLogic Server or cluster, create a new connection factory and specify the appropriate WebLogic Server target.
It is recommended that existing code that use the deprecated classes be modified to use a new default or user-defined connection factory class. For example, if your code specified the following constant using the default queue connection factory:public final static String JMS_FACTORY="javax.jms.QueueConnectionFactory"You should modify the constant to use a new user-defined connection factory, for example:public final static String JMS_FACTORY="weblogic.jms.QueueConnectionFactory"For true backwards compatibility with previous releases, you should ensure that you select the Allow Close In onMessage and User Transactions Enabled check boxes when configuring the connection factory. For more information about using connection factories, see ConnectionFactory Object. For more information about defining connection factories, see "JMS Connection Factory Tasks" in the Administration Console Online Help.
In order to instantiate the default connection factories on a particular WebLogic Server, select the Enable Default JMS Connection Factories check box on the Server --> Services --> JMS node tab when configuring the WebLogic Server. None required. This is a configuration requirement. For more information, see "Server --> Services --> JMS in the Administration Console Online Help.
Connections When closing a connection, the call blocks until outstanding synchronous calls and asynchronous listeners have completed. None required.
Sessions When closing a session, the call blocks until outstanding synchronous calls and asynchronous listeners have completed. None required.
Message Consumers If multiple topic subscribers are defined in the same session for the same topic, each consumer will receive its own copy of a message. None required.
When closing a message consumer, if the consumer is asynchronous then the call blocks until outstanding calls to the onMessage() method complete. None required.
In order to comply with the JMS specification, if the close() method is called from within an onMessage() method, the application will hang unless the Allow Close In OnMessage check box is selected when configuring the connection factory. If the acknowledge mode is AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE, the current message will still be automatically acknowledged. None required. This is a configuration requirement. For more information, see "JMS Connection Factories in the Administration Console Online Help.
Message Header Field The JMSMessageID header field format has changed. If you wish to access existing messages using the JMSMessageID, you may need to run one of the following weblogic.jms.extensions.JMSHelper methods to convert between WebLogic pre-JMS 5.1 and JMS 6.x JMSMessageID formats.To convert from pre-5.1 to 6.x JMSMessageID format:public void oldJMSMessageIDToNew( String id, long timeStamp
) throws JMSExceptionTo convert from 6.1 to pre- 6.1 JMSMessageID format:public void newJMSMessageIDToOld( String id, long timeStamp
) throws JMSException
Destinations The createQueue() and createTopic() methods do not create destinations dynamically, only references to destinations that already exist given the vendor-specific destination name. Update any portion of code that uses createQueue() or createTopic() to dynamically create destinations using the following JMSHelper class methods, respectively: createPermanentQueueAsync() and createPermanentTopicAsync().For example, if your code used the following method to dynamically create a queue:queue=qsession.createQueue(queueName);You should modify the code to dynamically create a queue, as described in the sample findQueue() method in Using the JMSHelper Class Methods.For more information on the JMSHelper classes, see Creating Destinations Dynamically.
When creating temporary destinations, specify a temporary template. None required. This is a configuration requirement. For more information, see "JMS Server --> Configuration --> General in the Administration Console.
You must be the owner of the connection in order to create a message consumer for that temporary destination. When creating a message consumer on a temporary destination, ensure that you are the owner of the connection.
Durable Subscribers You no longer need to manually create JDBC tables for durable subscribers. They are created automatically. None required.
There is no limit on the number of durable subscribers that can be created. None required.
When defining a client ID programatically, it must be defined immediately after creating a connection. Otherwise, an exception will be thrown and you will be unable to make any other JMS calls on that connection. Ensure that the setClientID() method is issued immediately after creating the connection. For more information, refer to Defining the Client ID.
Session Pools Session pool factories, session pools, referenced connection factories, referenced destinations, and associated connection consumers must all be targeted on the same JMS server. None required. This is a configuration requirement. Ensure that all objects are targeted on the same JMS server. For more information, see "JMS Server Tasks in the Administration Console.
The SessionPoolManager and ConnectionConsumerManager interfaces that were published as part of the WebLogic JMS version 5.1 Javadoc have been removed from the version 6.x and later Javadoc, as they are system interfaces and should not be used within client applications. If used, remove any references to these objects from the client application.
Transactions To combine JMS and EJB database calls within the same transaction, a two-phase commit (2PC) license is required. In previous releases of WebLogic Server, it was possible to combine them by using the same database connection pool. None required.
Recovering or rolling back received queue messages makes them available to all consumers on the queue. In previous releases of WebLogic Server, rolled back messages were only available to the session that rolled back the message, until that session was closed. None required.

Existing Feature 6.0 to 6.1 Functionality Changes

The following table lists the changes in existing feature functionality from WebLogic Server 6.0, and also indicates any code changes that might be required as a result.
For additional information pertaining to the JMS Specification's change history, see Chapter 11, "Change History," of Sun Microsystems' JMS Specification.

Category

Description

Code Modification
Connection Factories For the Acknowledge Policy attribute in the Administration Console, the new default value of All is a work-around to accommodate a change in the JMS Specification. This new default setting represents a change from prior versions of JMS, which internally defaulted to Previous, and which did not appear as an option in the Administration Console. As the message acknowledge policy for the connection factory, the Acknowledge Policy attribute only applies to applications that use the CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE mode for a non-transacted session.
All - acknowledge all messages ever received by a given session, regardless of which message calls the acknowledge method.

Previous - acknowledge all messages received by a given session, but only up to and including the message that calls the acknowledge method.
For more information on message acknowledge modes, refer to Non-Transacted Session.
Note: For connection factories used by MDBs, always set the Acknowledge Policy field to Previous. Although the default MDB connection factory already does this, foreign connection factories may not.
If you want to acknowledge only previously received messages, up to and including the message that calls the acknowledge method, change the default Acknowledge Policy setting from All to Previous via the JMS Connection Factories tab in the Administration Console.
Destinations In WLS 6.0, the JMS documentation correctly specifies values of default, true, and false for the StoreEnabled attribute of the JMSDestinationMBean, even though the software allowed for mixed case characters. Version 6.1 or later requires all lowercase characters for the StoreEnabled settings. None required. This is a configuration requirement. For more information, see "JMS Templates in the Administration Console Online Help.

Porting Existing Applications

This release of WebLogic Server supports Sun Microsystems' JMS Specification. In order to use your existing JMS applications, first confirm your version of WebLogic Server, and then perform the appropriate porting procedures provided in this section.
Steps for Porting Version 5.1 Applications to Version 8.1
Steps for Porting Version 6.0 Applications to Version 8.1
Steps for Porting Version 6.1 or 7.0 Applications to Version 8.1

Before You Begin

Before beginning the porting procedure, you should check the following list to confirm whether porting is support for your version of WebLogic Server JMS, and to find out whether special porting rules apply to that release:
Weblogic Server 5.1 - Customers running SP07 or SP08 should contact BEA Support before porting existing JDBC stores to version 8.1.
In order to port object messages, the object classes need to be in the Weblogic Server 8.1 server CLASSPATH.
For destinations that are not configured in Weblogic Server 8.1, the ported messages will be dropped and the event will be logged.
WebLogic Server 6.1 and 7.0 - All applications are supported in version 8.1. However, if you want your applications to take advantage of the new highly available JMS Distributed Destination feature, you will need to configure your existing physical destinations (queues and topics) to be part of a single distributed destination set. For more information, Using Distributed Destinations.

Steps for Porting Version 5.1 Applications to Version 8.1

Before you can use an existing WebLogic JMS 5.1 application, port the WebLogic Server 5.1 configuration and message data to version 8.1 as follows:

Properly shut down the old version of WebLogic Server before beginning the porting process.
Warning: Abruptly stopping the old version of WebLogic Server while messaging is still in process may cause problems during porting. Processing should be inactive before shutting down the old server and beginning the porting to WebLogic Server 8.1.
Upgrade the WebLogic Server environment, as described in Installing WebLogic Server.
Ported configuration information using the configuration conversion facility.
During the configuration porting, the following default queue and topic connection factories are enabled:
javax.jms.QueueConnectionFactory
javax.jms.TopicConnectionFactory
weblogic.jms.ConnectionFactory
weblogic.jms.XAConnection Factory

The first two connection factories are deprecated, but they are still defined and usable for backwards compatibility. For information on the new default connection factories, see ConnectionFactory Object.
The JMS administrator will need to review the resulting configuration to ensure that the conversion meets the needs of the application. In this case, all of the JMS attributes will be mapped to a single node, as in version 5.1.
Note: In versions 6.0 or later, JMS queues are defined during configuration, and no longer saved within database tables. Message data and durable subscriptions are stored either in two JDBC tables or via a directory within the file system.
Prepare for automatic porting of existing JDBC database stores.

Make a backup of the existing JDBC database.
Ensure that the ported configuration information (see step 2) contains a JDBC database store with exactly the same attributes as the existing store, and that the new JMS servers that use the store define the same destinations and corresponding destination attributes as the existing JMS servers.
If the new JDBC database store already exists, ensure that it is empty.
The new JDBC database store will be created during the automatic porting, if required.
Ensure that there is twice the amount of disk space required by the JDBC database store available on the system.
Both the existing and new database information will exist on disk while the porting is performed, doubling the space requirements. Once porting is complete, you can delete the old JDBC database stores, as described in Deleting JDBC Database Stores.

Update any existing code, as required, to reflect the feature functionality changes described in Existing Feature 5.1 to 6.0 Functionality Changes.
Start up the WebLogic Server and the existing JDBC database stores will be upgraded automatically.
Note: If the automatic porting fails for any reason, the automatic upgrade will be re-attempted the next time the WebLogic Server boots.

Deleting JDBC Database Stores

Once the porting is complete, the old JDBC database tables should be removed using the utils.Schema utility, described in detail in JDBC Database Utility.
During porting, a DDL file is generated and stored in the local working directory. The DDL file is named drop_<jmsServerName>_oldtables.ddl, where <jmsServerName> specifies the name of the JMS server. To delete the JDBC database stores, you pass the resulting DDL file as an argument to the utils.Schema utility.
For example, to delete the old JDBC database store from a JMS server named MyJMSServer, run the following command:
java utils.Schema jdbc:weblogic:oracle weblogic.jdbc.oci.Driver -s server -u user1 -p foobar -verbose drop_MyJMSServer_oldtables.ddl
For more information on the utils.Schema utility, see JDBC Database Utility.

Steps for Porting Version 6.0 Applications to Version 8.1

Before you can use an existing WebLogic JMS 6.0 application, port the WebLogic Server 6.0 configuration and message data to version 8.1 as follows

Check the connection factory configuration for version 6.0. You may need to modify programs that call the version 8.1 default connection factory so that they load one of the following connection factories:
One of the version 6.0 default connection factories.
A custom connection factory.

Properly shut down the version 6.0 WebLogic Server before beginning the porting process.
Warning: Abruptly stopping the old version of WebLogic Server while messaging is still in process may cause problems during porting. Processing should be inactive before shutting down the old server and beginning the porting to WebLogic Server 8.1.
Upgrade the WebLogic Server environment, as described in Installing WebLogic Server.
Update any existing code, as required, to reflect the feature functionality changes described in Existing Feature 5.1 to 6.0 Functionality Changes.
Warning: Before starting the version 8.1 WebLogic Server, you may want to backup your version 6.0 stores. This is because version 6.0 servers cannot use 8.1 stores, and any attempts to do so may cause data corruption.
Start the version 8.1 WebLogic Server. This server will continue to use the previous version 6.0 stores.

Steps for Porting Version 6.1 or 7.0 Applications to Version 8.1

All WebLogic JMS 6.1 and 7.0 applications are supported in version 8.1. However, if you want your applications to take advantage of the highly available Distributed Destination feature, you need to configure your existing physical destinations (queues and topics) to be part of a single distributed destination set.
For more information on using JMS distributed destinations, see Using Distributed Destinations.

Category	Description	Code Modification
Connection Factories	Two default connection factories have been deprecated. The JNDI names for these factories are: javax.jms.QueueConnectionFactory javax.jms.TopicConnectionFactory For backwards compatibility, the JNDI names for these two connection factories are still defined and supported. WebLogic JMS 6.x or later defines one connection factory, by default: weblogic.jms.ConnectionFactoryYou can also specify user-defined connection factories using the Administration Console. Note: Using the default connection factories, you have no control over the WebLogic server on which the connection factory may be deployed. However, you can can enable and/or disable the default connection factories on a per WebLogic Server basis. To deploy a connection factory on a particular WebLogic Server or cluster, create a new connection factory and specify the appropriate WebLogic Server target.	It is recommended that existing code that use the deprecated classes be modified to use a new default or user-defined connection factory class. For example, if your code specified the following constant using the default queue connection factory:public final static String JMS_FACTORY="javax.jms.QueueConnectionFactory"You should modify the constant to use a new user-defined connection factory, for example:public final static String JMS_FACTORY="weblogic.jms.QueueConnectionFactory"For true backwards compatibility with previous releases, you should ensure that you select the Allow Close In onMessage and User Transactions Enabled check boxes when configuring the connection factory. For more information about using connection factories, see ConnectionFactory Object. For more information about defining connection factories, see "JMS Connection Factory Tasks" in the Administration Console Online Help.
Connection Factories	In order to instantiate the default connection factories on a particular WebLogic Server, select the Enable Default JMS Connection Factories check box on the Server --> Services --> JMS node tab when configuring the WebLogic Server.	None required. This is a configuration requirement. For more information, see "Server --> Services --> JMS in the Administration Console Online Help.
Connections	When closing a connection, the call blocks until outstanding synchronous calls and asynchronous listeners have completed.	None required.
Sessions	When closing a session, the call blocks until outstanding synchronous calls and asynchronous listeners have completed.	None required.
Message Consumers	If multiple topic subscribers are defined in the same session for the same topic, each consumer will receive its own copy of a message.	None required.
	When closing a message consumer, if the consumer is asynchronous then the call blocks until outstanding calls to the onMessage() method complete.	None required.
	In order to comply with the JMS specification, if the close() method is called from within an onMessage() method, the application will hang unless the Allow Close In OnMessage check box is selected when configuring the connection factory. If the acknowledge mode is AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE, the current message will still be automatically acknowledged.	None required. This is a configuration requirement. For more information, see "JMS Connection Factories in the Administration Console Online Help.
Message Header Field	The JMSMessageID header field format has changed.	If you wish to access existing messages using the JMSMessageID, you may need to run one of the following weblogic.jms.extensions.JMSHelper methods to convert between WebLogic pre-JMS 5.1 and JMS 6.x JMSMessageID formats.To convert from pre-5.1 to 6.x JMSMessageID format:public void oldJMSMessageIDToNew( String id, long timeStamp ) throws JMSExceptionTo convert from 6.1 to pre- 6.1 JMSMessageID format:public void newJMSMessageIDToOld( String id, long timeStamp ) throws JMSException
Destinations	The createQueue() and createTopic() methods do not create destinations dynamically, only references to destinations that already exist given the vendor-specific destination name.	Update any portion of code that uses createQueue() or createTopic() to dynamically create destinations using the following JMSHelper class methods, respectively: createPermanentQueueAsync() and createPermanentTopicAsync().For example, if your code used the following method to dynamically create a queue:queue=qsession.createQueue(queueName);You should modify the code to dynamically create a queue, as described in the sample findQueue() method in Using the JMSHelper Class Methods.For more information on the JMSHelper classes, see Creating Destinations Dynamically.
	When creating temporary destinations, specify a temporary template.	None required. This is a configuration requirement. For more information, see "JMS Server --> Configuration --> General in the Administration Console.
	You must be the owner of the connection in order to create a message consumer for that temporary destination.	When creating a message consumer on a temporary destination, ensure that you are the owner of the connection.
Durable Subscribers	You no longer need to manually create JDBC tables for durable subscribers. They are created automatically.	None required.
	There is no limit on the number of durable subscribers that can be created.	None required.
	When defining a client ID programatically, it must be defined immediately after creating a connection. Otherwise, an exception will be thrown and you will be unable to make any other JMS calls on that connection.	Ensure that the setClientID() method is issued immediately after creating the connection. For more information, refer to Defining the Client ID.
Session Pools	Session pool factories, session pools, referenced connection factories, referenced destinations, and associated connection consumers must all be targeted on the same JMS server.	None required. This is a configuration requirement. Ensure that all objects are targeted on the same JMS server. For more information, see "JMS Server Tasks in the Administration Console.
Session Pools	The SessionPoolManager and ConnectionConsumerManager interfaces that were published as part of the WebLogic JMS version 5.1 Javadoc have been removed from the version 6.x and later Javadoc, as they are system interfaces and should not be used within client applications.	If used, remove any references to these objects from the client application.
Transactions	To combine JMS and EJB database calls within the same transaction, a two-phase commit (2PC) license is required. In previous releases of WebLogic Server, it was possible to combine them by using the same database connection pool.	None required.
Transactions	Recovering or rolling back received queue messages makes them available to all consumers on the queue. In previous releases of WebLogic Server, rolled back messages were only available to the session that rolled back the message, until that session was closed.	None required.