Advanced JMS

The idea behind this post is to get accustomed with the advanced features of JMS. It is expected that the fundamentals of JMS is known to the reader.

• Controlling message acknowledgment
  
• Specifying message persistence
  
• Setting message priority levels
  
• Allowing messages to expire
  
• Creating temporary destinations
  

Controlling message acknowledgment:

Until a JMS message has been acknowledged, it is not considered to be successfully consumed.

In nontransacted sessions, when and how a message is acknowledged depends on the value specified as the second argument of the createQueueSession or createTopicSession method. The three possible argument values are:

Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE. The session automatically acknowledges a client's receipt of a message either when the client has successfully returned from a call to receive or when theMessageListener it has called to process the message returns successfully. A synchronous receive in an AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE session is the one exception to the rule that message consumption is a three-stage process. In this case, the receipt and acknowledgment take place in one step, followed by the processing of the message.

Session.CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE. A client acknowledges a message by calling the message's acknowledge method. In this mode, acknowledgment takes place on the session level: Acknowledging a consumed message automatically acknowledges the receipt of all messages that have been consumed by its session. For example, if a message consumer consumes ten messages and then acknowledges the fifth message delivered, all ten messages are acknowledged.

Session.DUPS_OK_ACKNOWLEDGE. This option instructs the session to lazily acknowledge the delivery of messages. This is likely to result in the delivery of some duplicate messages if the JMS provider fails, so it should be used only by consumers that can tolerate duplicate messages. (If it redelivers a message, the JMS provider must set the value of the JMSRedelivered message header to true.) This option can reduce session overhead by minimizing the work the session does to prevent duplicates.

If messages have been received but not acknowledged when a QueueSession terminates, the JMS provider retains them and redelivers them when a consumer next accesses the queue. The provider also retains unacknowledged messages for a terminated TopicSession with a durable TopicSubscriber. Unacknowledged messages for a nondurable TopicSubscriber are dropped when the session is closed.

Specifying message persistence:

The JMS API supports two delivery modes for messages to specify whether messages are lost if the JMS provider fails. These delivery modes are fields of the DeliveryMode interface.

• The PERSISTENT delivery mode, which is the default, instructs the JMS provider to take extra care to ensure that a message is not lost in transit in case of a JMS provider failure. A message sent with this delivery mode is logged to stable storage when it is sent.
  
• The NON_PERSISTENT delivery mode does not require the JMS provider to store the message or otherwise guarantee that it is not lost if the provider fails.
  

You can specify the delivery mode in either of two ways.

• You can use the setDeliveryMode method of the MessageProducer interface--the parent of the QueueSender and the TopicPublisher interfaces--to set the delivery mode for all messages sent by that producer.
  
• You can use the long form of the send or the publish method to set the delivery mode for a specific message. The second argument sets the delivery mode. For example, the followingpublish call sets the delivery mode for message to NON_PERSISTENT:
  
• topicPublisher.publish(message, DeliveryMode.NON_PERSISTENT, 3, 10000);
  

  The third and fourth arguments set the priority level and expiration time, which are described in the next two subsections.
  

If you do not specify a delivery mode, the default is PERSISTENT. Using the NON_PERSISTENT delivery mode may improve performance and reduce storage overhead, but you should use it only if your application can afford to miss messages.

Setting message priority levels :

You can use message priority levels to instruct the JMS provider to deliver urgent messages first. You can set the priority level in either of two ways.

• You can use the setPriority method of the MessageProducer interface to set the priority level for all messages sent by that producer.
  
• You can use the long form of the send or the publish method to set the priority level for a specific message. The third argument sets the priority level. For example, the followingpublish call sets the priority level for message to 3:
  
• topicPublisher.publish(message, DeliveryMode.NON_PERSISTENT, 3, 10000);
  

The ten levels of priority range from 0 (lowest) to 9 (highest). If you do not specify a priority level, the default level is 4. A JMS provider tries to deliver higher-priority messages before lower-priority ones but does not have to deliver messages in exact order of priority.

Allowing messages to expire

By default, a message never expires. If a message will become obsolete after a certain period, however, you may want to set an expiration time. You can do this in either of two ways.

You can use the setTimeToLive method of the MessageProducer interface to set a default expiration time for all messages sent by that producer.

You can use the long form of the send or the publish method to set an expiration time for a specific message. The fourth argument sets the expiration time in milliseconds. For example, the following publish call sets a time to live of 10 seconds:

topicPublisher.publish(message, DeliveryMode.NON_PERSISTENT, 3, 10000);

If the specified timeToLive value is 0, the message never expires.

When the message is published, the specified timeToLive is added to the current time to give the expiration time. Any message not delivered before the specified expiration time is destroyed. The destruction of obsolete messages conserves storage and computing resources.

Creating temporary destinations

Normally, you create JMS destinations--queues and topics--administratively rather than programmatically. Your JMS or J2EE provider includes a tool that you use to create and to remove destinations, and it is common for destinations to be long lasting.

The JMS API also enables you to create destinations--TemporaryQueue and TemporaryTopic objects--that last only for the duration of the connection in which they are created. You create these destinations dynamically, using the QueueSession.createTemporaryQueue and the TopicSession.createTemporaryTopic methods.

The only message consumers that can consume from a temporary destination are those created by the same connection that created the destination. Any message producer can send to the temporary destination. If you close the connection that a temporary destination belongs to, the destination is closed and its contents lost.

You can use temporary destinations to implement a simple request/reply mechanism. If you create a temporary destination and specify it as the value of the JMSReplyTo message header field when you send a message, the consumer of the message can use the value of the JMSReplyTo field as the destination to which it sends a reply and can also reference the original request by setting the JMSCorrelationID header field of the reply message to the value of the JMSMessageID header field of the request.

Using JMS API Local Transactions

You can group a series of operations together into an atomic unit of work called a transaction. If any one of the operations fails, the transaction can be rolled back, and the operations can be attempted again from the beginning. If all the operations succeed, the transaction can be committed.

In a JMS client, you can use local transactions to group message sends and receives. The JMS API Session interface provides commit and rollback methods that you can use in a JMS client. A transaction commit means that all produced messages are sent and all consumed messages are acknowledged. A transaction rollback means that all produced messages are destroyed and all consumed messages are recovered and redelivered unless they have expired

A transacted session is always involved in a transaction. As soon as the commit or the rollback method is called, one transaction ends and another transaction begins. Closing a transacted session rolls back its transaction in progress, including any pending sends and receives.

In an Enterprise JavaBeansTM component, you cannot use the Session.commit and Session.rollback methods. Instead, you use distributed transactions.

You can combine several sends and receives in a single JMS API local transaction. If you do so, you need to be careful about the order of the operations. You will have no problems if the transaction consists of all sends or all receives or if the receives come before the sends. But if you try to use a request-reply mechanism, whereby you send a message and then try to receive a reply to the sent message in the same transaction, the program will hang, because the send cannot take place until the transaction is committed. Because a message sent during a transaction is not actually sent until the transaction is committed, the transaction cannot contain any receives that depend on that message's having been sent.

It is also important to note that the production and the consumption of a message cannot both be part of the same transaction. The reason is that the transactions take place between the clients and the JMS provider, which intervenes between the production and the consumption of the message. The sending of one or more messages to a queue by Client 1 can form a single transaction, because it forms a single set of interactions with the JMS provider. Similarly, the receiving of one or more messages from the queue by Client 2 also forms a single transaction. But because the two clients have no direct interaction, no transactions take place between them. Another way of putting this is that the act of producing and/or consuming messages in a session can be transactional, but the act of producing and consuming a specific message across different sessions cannot be transactional.

This is the fundamental difference between messaging and synchronized processing. Instead of tightly coupling the sending and receiving of data, message producers and consumers use an alternative approach to reliability, one that is built on a JMS provider's ability to supply a once-and-only-once message delivery guarantee.

When you create a session, you specify whether it is transacted. The first argument to the createQueueSession and the createTopicSession methods is a boolean value. A value of truemeans that the session is transacted; a value of false means that it is not transacted. The second argument to these methods is the acknowledgment mode, which is relevant only to nontransacted sessions. If the session is transacted, the second argument is ignored, so it is a good idea to specify 0 to make the meaning of your code clear. For example:

topicSession = topicConnection.createTopicSession(true, 0);

Because the commit and the rollback methods for local transactions are associated with the session, you cannot combine queue and topic operations in a single transaction. For example, you cannot receive a message from a queue and then publish a related message to a topic in the same transaction, because the QueueReceiver and the TopicPublisher are associated with aQueueSession and a TopicSession, respectively. You can, however, receive from one queue and send to another queue in the same transaction, assuming that you use the sameQueueSession to create the QueueReceiver and the QueueSender. You can pass a client program's session to a message listener's constructor function and use it to create a message producer, so that you can use the same session for receives and sends in asynchronous message consumers.