BEA was one of the first (and most important) companies to introduce a full-fledged EJB container. Their approach to JMS has been to add a JMS server to their existing product, WebLogic Server.
WebLogic Server is an application server that includes an EJB container, servlet, and JSP container and other facilities. In addition, WebLogic includes a JMS service provider that was introduced in version 4.5.1. In earlier versions, WebLogic provided a proprietary messaging system called WebLogic Events, which is still supported but is not the basis of their JMS implementation.
WebLogic's JMS service is compliant with JMS 1.0 and provides support for both the pub/sub and the p2p JMS messaging models. The server and clients are written in Java and therefore run on any platform with a Java Virtual Machine ( JDK 1.1 or higher).
WebLogic uses a centralized architecture based on the hub-and-spoke model. Clustering of JMS services is not currently supported, so load balancing and scalability are limited to a single server instance. The WebLogic server provides administrators with a GUI console that includes support for configuring JMS administered objects.
Persistent messages are supported through any relational database that can be accessed with JDBC. WebLogic does not support 2PC, but it does support coordinated transactions between their EJB container and JMS clients, provided that the database used for JMS persistence is the same database used by the enterprise beans.
WebLogic supports HTTP 1.1 tunneling (as well as HTTPS) which can be used to tunnel through both client-side and server-side firewalls. Support for tunneling is one of the core services provided by the WebLogic server. For authentication and access control, WebLogic supplies a pluggable "realm" Service-Provider Interface and a set of default realms (LDAP, NT, Unix, and a simple file-based realm). WebLogic supports SSL, including client-side certificates. WebLogic also supports access control lists on topics and queues; access lists control who may send or receive messages to a particular destination. Access control is used on message delivery, and when establishing consumers. It can also be used in their JNDI naming service to prevent access to administered objects.
The next version of WebLogic server will support JMS 1.0.2, clustering of JMS services, a web console based on the Java Management Extension ( JMX), and 2PC. In addition, the next version of WebLogic will include support for the EJB message-driven bean discussed in Chapter 7. The next version requires that JMS clients run on the JDK 1.2 or JDK 1.3 Virtual Machine, while the servers must run on the JDK 1.3 Virtual Machine.