- Introduction
- The J2EE Platform
- The J2EE APIs
- Java Connector Architecture (JCA)
- Java Message Service (JMS)
- Harris Kern's Enterprise Computing Institute
Java Message Service (JMS)
As discussed earlier, one of the cornerstone technologies of enterprise systems is a messaging platform. The Java Message Service (JMS) defines a platform-independent API to multiple messaging systems and is currently supported by the MQ Series from IBM, Sonic XQ from Sonic Software, and others; these vendors are known as JMS providers. Java client applications that use JMS to exchange messages are called JMS clients. JMS supports both models of integration: point-to-point and publish-and-subscribe.
Similar to JDBC, JMS defines the base API necessary to interact with multiple providers (in this case, messaging systems), but leaves many individual features for the vendors to differentiate. These include:
- Security
- Load balancing and fault tolerance
- Error notification
- Administration
- Wire protocols
The next article in this series will discuss the various J2EE vendors and their products.