In my previous two posts on ActiveMQ and Spring I’ve shown how to implement both asynchronous and synchronous messaging using MessageListenerContainers and JmsTemplates. Since then I have continued to tweak and improve my use of Spring’s JMS support and have uncovered a few more details about the ConnectionFactories supplied by both ActiveMQ and Spring and how they play together nicely and not so nicely. Some of this info is new while some was covered in my second post and lead to an edit in my initial post but I will reiterate that information here to keep it all in one place.

A simple but but comparison of ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ. This, combined with Reddit’s experience makes me pretty wary of using RabbitMQ.

A few months ago I did a deep dive into Efficient Lightweight JMS with Spring and ActiveMQ where I focused on the details for asynchronous sending and receiving of messages. In an ideal world all messaging would be asynchronous. If you need a response then you should set up an asynchronous listener and either have enough state stored in the service or in the message that you can continue processing once the response has been received. However, when ideals lead to complexity, we have to make the decision of how much complexity can we tolerate for the performance we need. Sometimes it just makes more sense to use a synchronous request/response.