Connecting to ActiveMQ broker using IBM client - activemq

Question

In my test I run inmem ActiveMQ and then instantiate ActiveMQConnectionFactory and do whatever I want in order to test it. I used this because that seemed to be the easiest way to create integration test. I thought the switch from ActiveMQConnectionFactory to com.ibm.mq.jms.MQTopicConnectionFactory would be straightforward. But it apparently is not. What would be the mapping from this snippet
<bean id="activeMqConnectionFactory" class="org.apache.activemq.ActiveMQConnectionFactory">
<constructor-arg value="vm://localhost:61616"/>
</bean>
to that one:
<bean id="ibmConnectionFactory" class="com.ibm.mq.jms.MQTopicConnectionFactory">
<property name="hostName" value="??"/>
<property name="port" value="??"/>
<property name="queueManager" value="??"/>
<property name="channel" value="??"/>
<property name="transportType" value="?"/>
</bean>
Would that be even possible without some kind of weird bridges Camel has?

Answer 1

This is not possible. The JMS specification covers the API and behavior but vendors are free to implement any wire format and communication protocols that they wish. WebSphere MQ uses it's own formats and protocols and Active MQ has its own formats and protocols.
Bridge applications function by reading messages into memory from one transport then writing that message to the other transport. Although this works at a basic level, the two transports have different destination namespaces and security realms so these interfaces tend to be hard-coded point-to-point routes. This is usually the best you can expect when mixing JMS transport providers.

Answer 2

You cannot do that, either with Camel or ActiveMQ JMS bridge, since you need a WebSphere MQ broker to connect to if you are using the IBM jms classes (e.g. com.ibm.mq.jms.MQTopicConnectionFactory )
I have, however, done extactly what you are trying to do in one project. The core idea is not to use the vendor specific classes, but the JMS interfaces in the code. Then you could store the configuration in JNDI (one for integration testing and one for production/acceptance testing).
If you do not want to use JNDI, you could perhaps use different spring context for each scenario, (that was my approach).
Let's take a simple example:
You two separate applicationContext.xml files (one embedded test and one production)
int-test:
<beans>
<import resource="jmsTest.xml"/>
<import resource="mainApplication.xml"/>
</beans>
Prod:
<beans>
<import resource="jmsProd.xml"/>
<import resource="mainApplication.xml"/>
</beans>
Then create your jms contexts:
jmsTest.xml:
<bean id="connectionFactory" class="org.apache.activemq.ActiveMQConnectionFactory">
<constructor-arg value="vm://localhost:61616"/>
</bean>
jmsProd.xml
<bean id="connectionFactory" class="com.ibm.mq.jms.MQConnectionFactory">
<property name="hostName" value=".."/>
...
</bean>
mainApplication.xml (jms listeners etc), same
<bean id="myJmsHandlingClass" class="some.custom.Class"/>
<property name="connectionFactory" ref="connectionFactory"/>
</bean>
Then just make sure to follow the JMS specs and do nothing vendor specific, since both WMQ and AMQ has extensions to the jms standard that might be tempting to use.
One tricky part if you are doing topics, is that AMQ and WMQ use different topic separators by default.
In WMQ: root/subtopic/#
In AMQ: root.subtopic.*
So you might want to inject destinations via spring as well, it's simliar to the connection factory above.