Installing ActiveMQ

What you need to run ActiveMQ on your machine is a recent Java development kit, and ActiveMQ itself. You can find the latter in the official Apache ActiveMQ download page, and you can get more information on the process in the related Getting Started page.

The ActiveMQ broker is ready to run out of the box, on its default port 61616, simply running a batch file in its binary folder. In my case, I have installed ActiveMQ on Windows XP (I know, we are in 2012, but this ancient operating system is still alive and kicking) in a folder named C:\dev\apache-activemq-5.5.1, and I run its broker executing from a shell in that folder the command

bin\activemq

As a feedback I get some log information including a notification of the JVM used, and on the started ActiveMQ components and subsystems. For the sake of testing the installation, the two most interesting lines are:

INFO | Listening for connections at: (your machine):61616
...
INFO | ActiveMQ Console at http://0.0.0.0:8161/admin

Whenever you want to check if the connection is still alive, you can run netstat, as I did here:

netstat -na|find "61616"
 TCP    0.0.0.0:61616          0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING

Meaning: the port 61616 on localhost is listening for a TCP connection. All is running as expected.

Besides, we can access the ActiveMQ console from our favorite browser at the http://localhost:8161/admin address, and see there a number of administrative information on the broker.