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Java Message Service Review by Jonathan Ross
Solid update to a standard reference
I learned JMS originally from the first edition of this book, so was interested to see how the material had changed. The second edition is significantly expanded (about 50% longer) but is still a quick read that builds very well on concepts from one chapter to the next.
Chapter 1 offers a thorough understanding of the use cases and maps it to core concepts in the JMS API. The next four chapters then develop this through successive examples; by the end of chapter 5 the reader understands both the point-to-point and publish/subscribe models. Subsequent chapters detail advanced features, container-managed messaging through EJB and Spring, and design / deployment.
The most welcome addition is the large chapter on Spring, which covers both JmsTemplate and message-driven POJOs; this will be of special interest to readers building enterprise apps who wish to avoid the overhead of a J2EE container. By contrast, the chapter on message-driven beans is unusually light; I was hoping for a bit more detail, for example 2PC involving a queue and database.
Overall the second edition offers excellent coverage to developers who need a fast start with JMS. It's thorough enough to help make decisions on messaging design but short enough to be absorbed in a day or two. And the use of Apache ActiveMQ for the examples means that, unlike with some other books on JMS, you don't have to buy commercial middleware to learn the material.