Introduction to ActiveMQ

Sort of mouthful of a title for this book, Instant Apache ActiveMQ messaging application development how-to, but don't let this taking you aback. It is a slim (sixty-sh pages) tutorial on ActiveMQ written by Timothy Bish, who actually is an active contributor to that Apache project.

You can't expect it to go too deep in the matter, after all it's in a series that has as headline "Learn in an instant, short, fast, focused", still it I think it is good as a first tutorial. It refers ActiveMQ version 5.8 (the latest release, currently), and it is thought for a Java developer who needs to get introduced to this message broker. You'd better to have some experience on Java, but you'd probably get the most of it even if you don't know much about MOM (Message-Oriented Middleware) and in particular about JMS, the Java EE messaging standard defined by the JSR 914 specification and implemented by ActiveMQ.

After installing ActiveMQ and setting up a working environment (no IDE is used, we are showed instead how to do it "by hand", via Maven), it is showed how to create a first simple application that sends and receive a message. Then we are introduced to JMS queues, topics, selectors. All this stuff is marked as "simple", and it is followed by a chapter where we are introduced to the request-response pattern (the only part of the book that is considered "intermediate").

The third part of the book consists in half a dozen "advanced" chapters where we can read about scheduling, monitoring, testing, pooling connections, using virtual destinations and failover transport.

Lot of examples help to make clearer the concepts explained by Bish in a plain and readable prose. There is no room to enter in much details, still many "There's more" sections offer pointers to find more information in the net.