This chapter provides an overview of the top six JMS providers today (IBM's MQSeries, Progress's SonicMQ , Fiorano's FioranoMQ , Softwired's iBus, Sun's JMQ , BEA's Weblogic), as well as one open source JMS provider (OpenJMS). It is important to note that not all enterprise messaging systems support JMS. Some of the largest MOM products still do not support JMS, namely Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) and Tibco. While the authors expect that Tibco will eventually support JMS, MSMQ is not expected to do so—Microsoft has never supported Java enterprise APIs.
Each product summary addresses the following five topics:
Product history
JMS version and operating systems supported
Architecture (centralized or distributed) and administration tools
Persistence mechanism and transactional support
Security (firewall tunneling, authentication, access control)
We have attempted to provide the version number for each product we discussed. Since new releases of these products will have additional features, we have also included a section on features expected for new versions along with all the product summaries.
Note
The term "JMS-compliant" is used throughout this chapter to indicate which version of JMS specification each provider claims to implement. It is important to note that Sun does not have any compatibility tests for JMS at this time, so there is no standard for verifying vendor's claims of compatibility.
Most vendors do not support two-phase commit. This is understandable, since support for the JMS XA interfaces and two-phase commit is purely optional.
IBM's MQSeries leads the enterprise messaging market. It was introduced in 1993, so it predates JMS and even Java as we know it. MQSeries was originally based on a point-to-point model, and recently introduced support for the publish-and-subscribe messaging in Version 5.
MQSeries provides a JMS 1.0.2-compliant provider that supports both the pub/sub and p2p JMS messaging models. The MQSeries JMS provider is supported on AIX, HP-UX, Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT, and Sun Solaris.
The server, MQSeries Queue Manager, is supported on a cornucopia of IBM platforms including AIX, MVS/ESA, OS/2 Warp, OS/390, AS/400 (IMPI & RISC), and VSE/ESA. It's also supported on a large number of Compaq platforms, including Tru64 UNIX, OpenVMS AXP, OpenVMS VAX, and Non-Stop Kernel. In addition, its server is supported on Linux (technology release), Microsoft Windows 2000 and NT, NCR (AT&T GIS) Unix, Siemens Nixdorf SINIX and DC/OSx, SCO OpenServer & UnixWare, SGI, Solaris, and HP-UX.
The MQSeries architecture is both centralized and distributed. It includes a hub-and-spoke model. A network can be made up of numerous interconnected MQSeries servers. It supports several network protocols in addition to TCP/IP, including LU 6.2, NetBIOS, and SPX. MQSeries provides a clustering architecture with fault-tolerance, fail-over, and load-balancing among servers in the cluster across different platforms. MQSeries provides a command-line tool and an administrative API for configuring and managing administered objects.
Persistence in MQSeries is based on a proprietary mechanism using the actual MQSeries queues. This allows messages to be exchanged directly with other MQSeries applications, without the need for a bridge program. Only local transactions are supported by MQSeries' JMS provider, so the JMS provider cannot participate as a resource in a two-phase commit.
MQSeries provides support for HTTP firewall tunneling through both client and server-side firewalls. It controls access to queues and topics via access control lists, based on operating system principals (on Windows NT this includes the Windows SID). Sender identification is included in MQSeries messages. Secure communications can be provided by user-written exit code, or third-party security products. Code to interface with the Entrust PKI is available.