Java Message Service

Chapter 5. Point-to-Point Messaging

This chapter focuses on the point-to-point (p2p) messaging domain. Many of the concepts of p2p messaging are similar to those we learned in Chapter 4. To avoid redundancy, this chapter highlights the areas where the two models are the same, and focuses on the areas where the two models differ.

In the p2p model, the producer is called a sender and the consumer is called a receiver . The most important characteristics of the point-to-point model are:

• Messages are exchanged through a virtual channel called a queue. A queue is a destination to which producers send messages, and a source from which receivers consume messages.

• Each message is delivered only to one receiver. Multiple receivers may connect to a queue, but each message in the queue may only be consumed by one of the queue’s receivers.

• Messages are ordered. A queue delivers messages to consumers in the order they were placed in the queue by the message server. As messages are consumed they are removed from the head of the queue.

• There is no coupling of the producers to the consumers. Receivers and senders can be added dynamically at runtime, allowing the system to grow or shrink in complexity over time. (This is a characteristic of messaging systems in general.)

In this chapter, we introduce new versions of our Wholesaler and Retailer classes, called QWholesaler and QRetailer. QWholesaler still uses pub/sub to broadcast price quotes, while QRetailer uses a p2p queue to respond with “buy” orders ...