ActiveMQ vs JMS

The accepted answer emphasizes what is the structure of JMS is. Not disagreeing just want to add to it in case anyone else wants to know. ActiveMQ could be a JMS supplier. A JMS supplier shapes the computer program system for encouraging the utilize of JMS concepts interior an application. A single node of ActiveMQ which permits clients to associate to it and utilize these informing concepts is called an "ActiveMQ Broker." Enterprises feel this disparity with business actions such as mergers and acquisitions. This creates the need to maintain an increasingly heterogeneous collection of business applications. As your enterprise grows, so does the need to allow all of these platforms to share data. A number of architectural patterns exist today which help to solve this problem.

Some other examples of JMS providers are:

• HornetQ.
• RabbitMQ.
• SonicMQ.
• Winsows Azure Messaging

The following example shows a simple configuration of an ActiveMQ connection:

<jms:config name="JMS_Config">
 <jms:active-mq-connection >
  <jms:factory-configuration brokerUrl="tcp://localhost:61616" />
 </jms:active-mq-connection>
</jms:config>

This post explains a detailed difference between the ActiveMQ and JMS (or maybe about the details of their specifications). Hope it clears your concepts.

JMS is a specification. JMS has three main parts to it. The first is the producer, which is nothing more than a bean that submits a "message" to a JMS broker (#2) (the system that manages messages between producers and consumers). In this case, ActiveMQ is the broker. Once the broker receives a message, the consumer (#3), or Message-Driven Bean (MDB), processes the message.

If you want to work with JMS, you'll just write both your producer/consumer code using the JMS API, but behind the scenes there is a "resource adapter" that is a special ActiveMQ driver that will connect to an ActiveMQ instance and do the management for you.

Have a look at this post I made recently. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to write JMS beans, but I've got the basics down.