Thoughts of Tim Bish

Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ v1.5.3 released.

2012-01-28T07:33:00.000-08:00

Today marks the official release of Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ v1.5.3. We put a lot of work into this one fixing bugs that were found since the 1.5.2 release. Some really nice performance fixes in this release along with some thread leaks and concurrency errors.

For anyone on v1.5.2 I'd definitely recommend upgrading, there were a couple issues that should make failover recovery of consumer much more reliable.

Grab in from the Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ downloads page.

ActiveMQ-CPP Version 3.4.1 Released

2011-12-18T06:42:00.000-08:00

Its official, AcitveMQ-CPP v3.4.1 has now been released.

This is a bug fix release of the ActiveMQ-CPP client which includes some fixes for issues found since the initial v3.4.0 release. There is also one new feature that requires no API changes so it made it into this release. The session 'recover' method is now implemented, see the API docs for info on how its used. Some linker issues affecting dynamic libraries that several users on Mac and newer GCC releases have seen are fixed also.

Some highlights for this release:

* Implements the Session recover method.
* Fixed some build issues on Mac with dynamic libs.
* Fixed an issue with BytesMessage marshaling when compression is enabled.
* Fixed an issue on Windows with some unmarshaling cases causing a crash.
* A few other minor package and build fixes.

You can download the source package from here:

Apache.NMS.Stomp v1.5.2 Released

2011-11-19T10:19:00.000-08:00

Today marks the official release of Apache.NMS.Stomp v1.5.2. We put a lot of work into this one fixing bugs that were found since the 1.5.1 release.

For anyone on v1.5.1 I'd definitely recommend upgrading, there were a couple of threading issues that have been resolved which should make things more stable, and interoperability with Stomp v1.1 should be much improved.

The v1.5.2 release page is here

Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ v1.5.2 Released

2011-11-19T10:16:00.000-08:00

Today marks the official release of Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ v1.5.2. We put a lot of work into this one fixing bugs that were found since the 1.5.1 release. Some really nice performance fixes in this release along with some thread leaks and concurrency errors.

For anyone on v1.5.1 I'd definitely recommend upgrading, there were a couple of threading issues that have been resolved which should make things more stable, and reconnection times during failover should be much improved.

The v1.5.2 release page is here

Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ v1.5.1 Released

2011-06-04T05:02:00.000-07:00

Today marks the official release of Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ v1.5.1. We put a lot of work into this one fixing bugs that were found since the 1.5.0 release. The MS Distributed Transaction Support should be much more stable in this release.

For anyone on v1.5.0 I'd definitely recommend upgrading, there were a couple of threading issues that have been resolved which should make things more stable.

The v1.5.1 release page is here

CamelOne Conference plus Free Community Event

2011-05-10T07:36:00.000-07:00

FuseSource is sponsoring a free community event in line up for the CamelOne conference.

Community Event

Many of us are going to be in the Washington DC area the week of May 23rd for CamelOne. Meet other users, developers and committers on Apache Camel, ServiceMix, ActiveMQ and CXF at a free Community Meet and Greet sponsored by FuseSource on Monday, May 23rd from 6-8 pm in the Pinzimini Restaurant at the Westin Arlington Gateway. This event will have free food and drinks and FuseSource is hosting it so that we can get-together and catch up while many of us are in town for CamelOne. There is a great speaker line up for CamelOne, and many of those speakers can't turn down free beers and to socialize. So come and say hi to the fathers of the EIPs: Gregor Hophe (author of EIP book) and James Strachan (founder of Camel). Also Jonathan and Claus will be there as well, and we are all speaking at the CamelOne conference.

The free Community Meet and Greet is on Monday night, May 23rd, CamelOne runs all day on Tuesday, May 24th, followed by a reception, and we have 2 Day training classes running on Wed-Thursday.

CamelOne Conference

CamelOne is the premier Open Source Integration and Messaging Conference, and in one session-filled day you can learn about the advantages of open source software, how to successfully develop and deploy solutions, and what organizations like FAA and Sabre Holdings are building with open source.

Come to CamelOne 2011 and:

Learn how IT organizations are saving money and gaining vendor-independence by using open source
Meet industry experts and the founders and leaders of Apache's most popular integration and messaging projects
Network with developers, architects, decision makers and vendors

CamelOne is the first ever community event created specifically for enterprise users of open source Apache Camel, ServiceMix, ActiveMQ and CXF. It includes technical and business sessions, and keynote presentations by Gregor Hohpe, co-author of Enterprise Integration Patterns, James Strachan, the creator of Groovy, Apache Camel, and many other widely known open source projects and David Linthicum, CTO and Founder of Blue Mountain Labs, and Author of Enterprise Application Integration. The event will also include technical sessions, networking venues and hands-on product training from FuseSource, the leading vendor of open source integration and messaging solutions.

Why Attend?

Lessons from Enterprise Users of Open Source Integration and Messaging Solutions, including FAA, Sabre, and AT&T that covering topics such as architectural implementation details, best practices, and how to justify using open source to internal stakeholders
Many Sessions from Developers and Project Founders and Committers covering Apache Camel, ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, and CXF.
2-Day Hands-On Training Classes on ServiceMix with Camel and ActiveMQ.
One event to answer all questions about open source, and the resources to get started
Meet peers that are being successful today
Have your books signed by authors of the: EIP book, EAI book, Camel in Action, and ActiveMQ in Action

More details about speakers and agenda at the CamelOne web site.

ActiveMQ-CPP v3.4.0 Released

2011-04-29T06:15:00.000-07:00

Right on the heels of the AcitveMQ-CPP v3.3.0 release comes a new v3.4.0 release. Thanks to some helpful users we identified some issues that really needed to get fixed and also spotted some places where we could improve the CMS API.

This is a major release of the ActiveMQ-CPP client which includes some API changes so ABI breakage is expected and there's several improvements over the 3.3.0 release in the area of failover. Some additional methods have been added to the CMS API to make it easier to use, see the API documentation for more information.

Some highlights for this release:

* Added start and stop methods to CMS Session and MessageConsumer.
* Fixed some build issues on Windows, DLLs should work again.
* Resolved some issues with failover not recovering consumers correctly.
* Fixed some problems with URI parsing.

You can download the source package from here.

ActiveMQ-CPP v3.3.0 Released

2011-04-16T04:55:00.000-07:00

Its official, AcitveMQ-CPP v3.3.0 has now been released.

This is a major release of the ActiveMQ-CPP client which includes some
API changes and several new features and improvements. Some additional
methods have been added to the CMS API to make it easier to use, see the
API documentation for more information.

Some highlights for this release:

* Solved some deadlock issues that could occur during failover
when using asynchronous consumers.
* Synchronous Consumers now get an exception if they call receive
when the Connection has failed.
* CMS API now provides an XA domain for linking the CMS client
into XA transactions.
* The Failover Transport now supports the connection rebalancing
feature in ActiveMQ.
* Fixes in the Stomp handling allow the client to work with
ActiveMQ Apollo.
* Better message redelivery processing for Transacted consumers.
* Fixes to the AutoConf script make builds more reliable.
* Lots of other minor fixes and improvements.

You can download the source package from here:

ActiveMQ-CPP v3.2.5 Released

2011-03-05T15:22:00.000-08:00

Another new release, ActiveMQ-CPP v3.2.5 is out. This release fixes some more bugs found in the v3.2.4 release. The download page is located here.

One important fix is that the client will now work on Mac again, although only if built as a static lib, for some reason the dylib segfaults.

This release also fixes some issues with validation on X509 certificates in the SSL transport and improves the URI parsing code so your complex failover transport URI's should now be handled much better.

Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ v1.5.0 Released

2011-02-18T15:16:00.000-08:00

Today marks the official release of Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ v1.5.0. We put a lot of work into this one fixing bugs and adding some great new features. Here's a list of some of the important changes in this version.

New startupMaxReconnectAttempts option in the failover transport.
Fixed a memory leak in the Inactivity Monitoring code.
Fixed a bug that could cause the Failover to not work.
Fixed a bug that caused SSL Certs to not be loaded in some cases.
Several other bugfixes for issues found since v1.4.0 was released.
Added support for participation in .NET Distributed Transactions (MSDTC).
Added .NET 4.0 build.
Many more fixes and internal improvements.

For anyone on v1.4.0 I'd definitely recommend upgrading, there were a couple of resources leaks in there that are fixed now.

I've also been working on overhauling the NMS Website, if anyone has any NMS articles or samples they'd like to share I'd be glad to work them into the new site. Or if you just want to let us know you are using NMS that'd be great look, we would gladly add a link to projects using NMS to the site.

The v1.5.0 release page is here.

Apache.NMS.Stomp v1.5.1 released.

2011-01-31T05:37:00.000-08:00

The Apache.NMS.Stomp 1.5.1 Release bundle is now available. This release is based on the Apache.NMS API v1.5.0 and runs on .NET frameworks 2.0+, .NETCF 2.0+ and Mono 2.0+. This version fixed some bugs that were found in the initial Stomp client v1.5.0 release.

Changes in the v1.5.x release of the .NET Stomp client include:

v1.5.0

Support for the current changes in the Stomp 1.1 draft specification.
Improved Inactivity Monitoring with two way heartbeats when used with a Stomp v1.1 broker.
New startupMaxReconnectAttempts option in the failover transport.
Several other bugfixes for issues found since v1.4.0 was released.

v1.5.1

Fixed a memory leak in the Inactivity Monitoring code.
Fixed a bug that could cause the Failover to not work.
Fixed a bug that caused SSL Certs to not be loaded in some cases.
Fixed a bug that was causing major performance issues for synchronous consumers.
Fixed issues found with the Stomp v1.1 support.

You can download the release bundles from the Apache.NMS 1.5.0 download page

ActiveMQ-CPP v3.2.4 Released

2010-12-10T11:32:00.000-08:00

ActiveMQ-CPP v3.2.4 is out now.

This release addresses some issues with the CMSTemplate classes and fixes a Stomp bug that was preventing the client from making connections via stomp.

There were also some changes in the Autotools scripts that hopefully make the pkg-config and libtool versions work together better.

The source bundle is available on the release page, download it from here:

NMS.Stomp now has Stomp v1.1 support

2010-11-09T08:35:00.000-08:00

If you checkout the trunk code of NMS.Stomp you can now connect up to a Stomp v1.1 broker and it will take advantage of the new features in the Stomp v1.1 spec. I started working on this on Friday and think I've got everything working now. So what do you get, well for now the main thing is that Stomp v1.1 supports heart beats between client and broker so the NMS.Stomp client is much more resilient when it comes to detecting that its connection to the broker has dropped. The Failover Transport that I added to NMS.Stomp in v1.4 should get informed by the inactivity monitor now much quicker that it needs to reconnect.

You can try it out using the Apollo broker which you can download from here.

FuseSource now officially launched.

2010-10-27T06:39:00.000-07:00

Its now official, FuseSource is now operationally independent from Progress Software, Rob has explained the background along with Larry's interview and Dana's podcast much better than I could have.

This is exciting news and the future of FuseSource looks to be bright. The team is growing and still includes the talent that brought about Apache ActiveMQ, Apache Camel and Apache ServiceMix. The Roadmap for 2011 looks to be a good one with continued work on the Apache projects we all know and love as well as some great new FuseSource projects that are currently in the works. Should be fun times ahead...

ActiveMQ C API under development

2010-10-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

Recently I started working on a C API for ActiveMQ. The idea is to wrap the ActiveMQ-CPP library in a C accessible API in order to leverage all the hard work that has gone into making the C++ client. I've made some good progress so far, I've wrapped all the CMS API's for ConnectionFactory, Connection, Session, Producer and Consumer. I'm part way through mapping the CMS Message APIs into C APIs.

We still don't have any unit tests written for it but there's some sample code that compiles, and runs (at least it did).

It would be great if some C developers out there wanted to chip in and help out on this as my C skills are pretty rusty. There's still a lot to be done in the wrappers like better managing error conditions and reporting the errors in a meaningful way.

You can download the source from the Apache SVN here.

Enhanced JMS Scheduler in ActiveMQ

2010-10-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

Previously we added the ability to schedule delivery of Messages on the ActiveMQ broker. To schedule a message all you need to do is create the Message and then set some properties in the Message headers, simple right, and it allows for pretty much any client to access this functionality whether it talks Openwire or Stomp. To manage those scheduled message however you were limited to using the JMX console or the Web console, and while it nice that you can manage them the current setup does prevent Stomp users from playing.

This weekend I coded up a patch that allows you to manage your scheduled messages much the same way to create them in the first place, by sending some Messages. I've added support for requesting that the broker send all the scheduled messages to a destination of you choosing as well as allowing you to then request that certain messages be deleted from the schedule, or all of them for that matter. Lets take a look at how it works...

First thing you probably want to do is to see what messages are scheduled, so to accomplish that you need to create a Producer that publishes on the Destination named: "ActiveMQ.Scheduler.Management". Once that's done you create a new Message and set some properties and add a Reply To destination so the scheduler knows where to send your Messages. Then all you need to do is process the messages with a Consumer that is subscribed to that Reply To destination.

        Connection connection = createConnection();
        Session session = connection.createSession(false, Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE);

        // Create the Browse Destination and the Reply To location
        Destination requestBrowse = session.createTopic(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_MANAGEMENT_DESTINATION);
        Destination browseDest = session.createTemporaryQueue();

        // Create the "Browser"
        MessageConsumer browser = session.createConsumer(browseDest);

        connection.start();

        // Send the browse request
        MessageProducer producer = session.createProducer(requestBrowse);
        Message request = session.createMessage();
        request.setStringProperty(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_ACTION,
                                ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_ACTION_BROWSE);
        request.setJMSReplyTo(browseDest);
        producer.send(request);

        Message scheduled = browser.receive(5000);
        while (scheduled != null) {
            // Do something clever...
        }

With the above code your consumer will be able to check all the Messages that are scheduled. Now if you happen to have a huge number of Messages scheduled then you probably don't want them all sent to your client, so to narrow down the results you can add two additional properties to your request Message to define the time window that you are concerned with, here's the browse request code again with the properties added to see what is scheduled for the next hour.

        // Send the browse request
        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
        long end = System.currentTimeMillis() + TimeUnit.HOURS.toMillis(1);

        MessageProducer producer = session.createProducer(requestBrowse);
        Message request = session.createMessage();
        request.setStringProperty(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_ACTION,
                                ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_ACTION_BROWSE);
        request.setStringProperty(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_ACTION_START_TIME, Long.toString(start));
        request.setStringProperty(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_ACTION_END_TIME, Long.toString(end));
        request.setJMSReplyTo(browseDest);
        producer.send(request);

Now that you have seen how to browse the messages that are scheduled for delivery lets take a look at how to manage the scheduled Messages that you've browsed. Each scheduled Message that is sent to your consumer contains in it a Job Id that can be used to remove that scheduled Message from the Scheduler using the same management destination that you used to request the browse from, here's an example of that.

        Message remove = session.createMessage();
        remove.setStringProperty(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_ACTION,
                ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_ACTION_REMOVE);
        remove.setStringProperty(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULED_ID,
                scheduled.getStringProperty(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULED_ID));
        producer.send(remove);

Here we create a new Message and assign it the remove action property and then set the Id of the scheduled using the Id from a Message that was sent to us on the browse destination we created earlier.

If you want to remove some scheduled Messages but don't want to browse them just to find the one's you are interested in you can do so using the remove option show above but instead of specifying an Id you can give it a time window in which to operate, here's an example show a remove operation requested for all scheduled Messages in the next hour.

        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
        long end = System.currentTimeMillis() + TimeUnit.HOURS.toMillis(1);

        Destination management = session.createTopic(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_MANAGEMENT_DESTINATION);

        MessageProducer producer = session.createProducer(management);
        Message request = session.createMessage();
        request.setStringProperty(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_ACTION,
                                  ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_ACTION_REMOVEALL);
        request.setStringProperty(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_ACTION_START_TIME, Long.toString(start));
        request.setStringProperty(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_ACTION_END_TIME, Long.toString(end));
        producer.send(request);

You can also remove all jobs from the scheduler with a single message, this is shown in the next example.

        Destination management = session.createTopic(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_MANAGEMENT_DESTINATION);

         MessageProducer producer = session.createProducer(management);
        Message request = session.createMessage();
        request.setStringProperty(ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_ACTION, ScheduledMessage.AMQ_SCHEDULER_ACTION_REMOVEALL);
        producer.send(request);

That's it for now.

Apache.NMS.Stomp v1.4.0 released.

2010-09-24T06:06:00.000-07:00

The Apache.NMS.Stomp 1.4.0 Release bundle is now available. This release is based on the Apache.NMS API v1.4.0 and runs on .NET frameworks 2.0+, .NETCF 2.0+ and Mono 2.0+.

Changes in this version include

* Added a FailoverTransport to the Stomp Client.
* Improved URI handling in all NMS clients.
* Improved handling of Request Timeout settings.
* Added a new SetBytes method to IMapMessage.
* Added a new MessageTransformer API.
* Many bug fixes.

There are release binaries and debug binaries (with PDBs) provided. The binary ZIP files include pre-built assemblies for all of the platforms that are supported.

You can download the source and binaries from here.

Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ v1.4.0 officially released.

2010-09-17T05:55:00.000-07:00

Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ v1.4.0 has just been released.

This release fixes several bugs found since the 1.3.0 release and also adds some great new features.

Improved URI handling in all NMS clients.
Improved handling of Request Timeout settings. When a request times out now you will see a RequestTimedOutException thrown.
Added a new SetBytes method to IMapMessage.
Added a new MessageTransformer API, you can now intercept a Message as its sent or received and add / update / or replace that message.
NMS.ActiveMQ will now handle transforming foreign NMS Messages into its own internal format when they are sent so you can easy route Messages from one NMS provider to another.
Many new Unit Tests added to the Test Suite.

You can download the binaries and source bundles here.

ActiveMQ-CPP v3.2.3 Released

2010-09-13T06:38:00.000-07:00

A new release of ActiveMQ-CPP is out today, v3.2.3.

This versions fixes a couple of issues with the 3.2.2 release.

Fix a threading issue when multiple connections were created from two or more threads at the same time.
Fix a segmentation fault when a MapMessage is received with a bytes array element that is empty.
Fix the pkg-config script to reflect the actual libtool library version and not the official release version.

You can download the source bundles from here.

Don't miss out on Apache Camel Webinars at FuseSource

2010-08-27T06:32:00.000-07:00

Coming in September there will be two new interactive webinars at FuseSource covering topics on Apache Camel.

September 8th - Claus Ibsen will give an introduction to Apache Camel including: core concepts, EIPs, components, and the community.
September 16th - Jonathan Anstey will go over deployment options for Camel including: embedded Java, Spring, ActiveMQ, ServiceMix (OSGi) and web app. This will include a live demonstration of deploying a Camel application in ServiceMix.

These interactive sessions provide a great resource for learning more about the projects and give you a chance to interact with the developers of the project.

You can register for the events now.

Don't forget you can also see archived webinars by going to the FuseSource site right now.

Check out the Enterprise ActiveMQ Webinar

2010-08-15T13:05:00.000-07:00

Besides the sure to be fun FUSE meetup next week in Boston there's also going to be a great Webinar next week on August 19th covering using ActiveMQ in an Enterprise environment given by Rob Davies. To attend you just need to go to fusesource and signup.

Rob will be covering several key topics such as Failover, high availability and scaling, along with covering some of the new features in the upcoming ActiveMQ 5.4.0 release. Don't miss out!

End of Summer Reading

2010-08-15T12:52:00.000-07:00

Just in time for that late August vacation there's two really cool books coming out from Manning: ActiveMQ in Action and Camel in Action.

To get a taste of what's offered in these books fusesource has exclusive excerpts available for free (no registration required):

- Chapter 9: Learn about using transactions with Camel

- Chapter 5: Learn how messages are stored in AMQ on KahaDB

Even better is that there's a great discount for both books, and all you have to do isstop by the fusesource site to find the 40% discount code you can use when ordering from the Manning web store.

Having just finished the ActiveMQ in Action book I can say its packed with great information that you can use when getting started with ActiveMQ and even for those that have been using it for awhile there's still plenty to take away from this book.

Camel in Action is already on the top 15 bestsellers list at Manning which should tell you something about the interest in Camel. I plan on picking up a copy soon myself.

Don't miss out on the FUSE meetup next week.

2010-08-15T12:33:00.000-07:00

Next week there's a couple of really cool events going for those who want to learn more about ActiveMQ ,Camel, ServiceMix and CXF, plus you can meet many of the people that are active on those projects.

First up there's an event poolside at the hip Indigo Lounge on Tuesday evening, August 17th. This should be a lot of fun (wish I was going), make sure you sign up so we know you're planning to attend.

From the invite:

Get the latest news on Apache ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, CXF and Camel. Discuss how others are using open source integration software and get advice from top integration and messaging experts. Learn more about FUSE Forge and the Apache Software Foundation and how you can get more involved using and contributing to open source integration software.

Meet the FUSE Rock Stars in person.

Rob Davies: Co-founder of Apache ActiveMQ, ServiceMix and Camel. Co-author of ActiveMQ in Action.
Stan Lewis: Committer on Apache Camel and open source expert on Apache projects
James Strachan: Co-founder of Apache ServiceMix, ActiveMQ and Camel
Claus Ibsen: Top contributor to Apache Camel, co-author of Camel in Action
Guillaume Nodet: Co-founder and top contributor to Apache ServiceMix, committer on Apache ActiveMQ, CXF, Camel , Geronimo, XBean, GShell, and ODE.
Hiram Chirino: Co-founder of Apache ActiveMQ and Camel, top contributor to Apache ActiveMQ
Chris Custine: Committer on Apache ServiceMix, Directory Server, and Felix
Hadrian Zbarcea: PMC Chair of Apache Camel

Meet and network with peers at this free meet up.
Register now.
Date: August 17th, 2010
Time: 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM
Location: Hotel Indigo Hotel, 399 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02462

ActiveMQ-CPP v3.2.2 Released

2010-07-30T07:01:00.000-07:00

A new bugfix release of ActiveMQ-CPP is out v3.2.2. For this who have experienced segfaults from APR Atomics on startup this release should address all those issues. There is also a fix for some bugs related to sending and receiving empty MapMessage objects.

You can download the source bundle from the ActiveMQ-CPP release page:

ActiveMQ-CPP v3.2.1 Released

2010-07-02T13:42:00.000-07:00

A new patch release of ActiveMQ-CPP is out, v3.2.1, you can download it from here.

This release targets some problems with the initial 3.2.0 release on Windows, the Visual Studio project files didn't get included in the final archives, this version now correctly include the Visual Studio 2008 project files (Note that Visual Studio 2005 users will have to down convert the project files). Also a compilation issue was addressed.

Some testing has been done using Visual Studio 2010 but 2008 is the current recommended compiler. If you convert the project files you will need to make one small change in the updated VS2010 project for activemq-cpp which is to change the "Target Name" for the project from the value given in the update to the following:

For all static lib builds in Debug mode it should be
Target Name = lib$(ProjectName)d

For all static lib builds in Release mode it should be
Target Name = lib$(ProjectName)

As always your feedback and bug reports are welcome, especially if you include good tests that reproduce the problem :)

Free stuff Rocks!

2010-06-29T10:39:00.000-07:00

For those who are curious about how ActiveMQ actually works internally then you should check this out, FuseSource (http://fusesource.com) is offering a free excerpt from "ActiveMQ in Action" and "Camel in Action" books at http://fusesource.com/fuse/apache-books/.

Find out more on how ActiveMQ stores messages and what's the role of
transactions in Camel and get your discount on these great new titles.

ActiveMQ-CPP v3.2.0 Released

2010-06-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

The next version of ActiveMQ-CPP is now out, v3.2.0. This version includes support for SSL using the OpenSSL library, as well as a functional QueueBrowser and message body compression.

You can download the source bundle from here

The CMS site also has an updated FAQ page that details how to build and use the new SSL support, you can find that here.

Apache.NMS.Stomp v1.3.0 officially released.

2010-05-28T13:28:00.001-07:00

The v1.3.0 of the Stomp .NET client is now out and includes support for SSL. You can download the release binaries from here.

This release also has several bugfixes as well.

Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ v1.3.0 officially released.

2010-05-21T12:08:00.000-07:00

The v1.3.0 of the ActiveMQ .NET client is now out and includes support for SSL and QueueBrowser. You can download the release binaries from here.

Also in this release you can now configure the local address and port that the tcp and ssl connection will bind to using the connection URI, see this article for an example. Also the FailoverTransport now supports the "timeout" parameter which indicates how long a send should block before failing if there's no current connection.

This release also has several bugfixes as well.

Ussing SSL in NMS.ActiveMQ

2010-04-01T08:45:00.000-07:00

With the recent addition of SSL support into NMS.ActiveMQ and NMS.Stomp I thought it'd be a good idea to write an article covering how to use the new functionality and explain some of the things to watch out for. At the time of this writing the SSL support is only in the trunk code, but will make its way into the NMS 1.3.0 release some time soon, until the release you can go to the NMS Site to get the latest code and find build instructions.

Once you have your NMS and NMS.ActiveMQ builds in hand you need to do a few more things before you can connect to a broker via SSL.

Broker SSL Configuration

The default broker configuration doesn't enable SSL so the first thing you need to do is add configuration of the SSL Transport to your Broker's configuration file, there's a pretty good how-to on the ActiveMQ website showing how to do that, so I won't reproduce it all here.

Of SSL Certificates and Trust

Now that you've configured your broker to support SSL connections its time to setup the client machine so that your newly built NMS and NMS.ActiveMQ assemblies can actually connect. When the NMS client tries to connect over SSL its going to want to validate that it can trust the server on the other end of the connection, this implies that the Certificate the broker sends the client when it connects is one that we trust. The trust relationship between the .NET client and the Broker comes from the broker sending a certificate that is either signed by a trusted Certificate Authtority or by virtue of us having added the Certificate itself to our list of trusted Certificates.

To add the Broker's Certificate to the list of trusted Certificates that .NET clients are aware of can be a painful and mysterious process. I'm working from a Linux box running Mono so I can tell you how to I did it, how its done on a Windows machine might be a bit different.

By following the instructions on the ActiveMQ sites "How do I use SSL" article you should have exported your Broker's SSL Certificate to a file named broker_cert (I named mine broker.cer instead). You can use the 'certmgr.exe' command to add that certificate to you list of Trusted Certificates like so:

certmgr -add -c Trust broker.cer

This add the Certificate to a list of trusted Certificates that should allow your NMS client to connect without encountering validation errors. I'll give you a hint on another way to make the connection to the Broker without adding the Certificate to you Trust store later on.

Connecting over SSL with NMS.ActiveMQ

Like any other connection using NMS the way we specify what server to connect to and how we want to do so is done via the connection URI. This means if you already have a working NMS client you can easily start using the SSL functionality simply by referencing the new Assemblies and updating you connection URI. So what does the new URI look like? Pretty much the same as the old one except where you would have put tcp you now put ssl. Sounds easy, lets take a look at a URI that I use to connect to my Broker:

ssl://localhost:61617

That's it, same old URI, new protocol. If you added the Broker's certificate to the Trust store then your client should connect and run just like it always has.

Something Went Wrong!

Well you knew it was to good to be true, it couldn't be that easy. You tried running your client and got a bunch of exceptions when it tried to connect, what to do.

A couple things can go wrong here, lets take a look:

The Broker Certificate wasn't in the Trust store.
The host name in the URI you used to connect doesn't match the common name of the Certificate your broker is using.

Earlier I showed you how to add the Broker's certificate to the Trust store, but maybe you didn't read that part, or maybe you couldn't figure out how to accomplish that for your particular version of Windows, well there's a workaround. Since I didn't want to always have to put the dummy self signed Certificates that I test with in the Trust store I added an URI option in NMS.ActiveMQ to let me bypass this, its called 'transport.acceptInvalidBrokerCert' and your URI would look as follows if you decided to use it:

ssl://localhost:61617?transport.acceptInvalidBrokerCert=true

This options pretty much forces the NMS client to accept any old Certificate that your Broker sends, so best to only use this in test environments.

Now onto the other common problem, your Broker's Certificate could have something in its Common Name field that's not the same as the host name you put in your URI. This could happen for a number of reasons especially when you are using self signed Certificates, fortunately we gave you a way around this one as well, if you need to override the name we use to look up the Server's Certificate from the host name use the 'transport.serverName' option:

ssl://localhost:61617?transport.serverName=\"My Test Cert\"

This will cause the NMS code to use "My Test Cert" as the name of lookup when authenticating the Server connection. Normally the name in the Certificate would match the URL of the server but when testing you might just be using IP addresses so this is a convenient workaround.

Conclusion

That's about all there is to it, pretty easy right? There's more to it if you want to do two way Client / Server authentication but I think I will save that for another posting. Hopefully you found this somewhat helpful. If you have questions or comments please let me know, I will update the posting if something is unclear or incorrect.

ActiveMQ-CPP 3.1.2 Released

2010-03-27T07:40:00.000-07:00

ActiveMQ-CPP v3.1.2 was just released. This version fixes some more issues found in the 3.1.x family improving overall stability. You can download the source bundle from here. This is a patch release so there were no API changes to worry about.

QueueBrowser now supported in NMS.ActiveMQ

2010-03-17T11:20:00.000-07:00

After finishing up the QueueBrowser support in ActiveMQ-CPP I went back and reworked a patch that had been submitted to NMS to fully support the QueueBrowser in NMS.ActiveMQ. Wasn't to hard to do since the use was nice enough to submit unit tests along with the patch (love it when they do that) so I just had to tweak some things for all the recent changes that went in to get NMS 1.2.0.

Using the NMS version of the QueueBrowser is pretty simple, you can get the code from NMS.ActiveMQ's trunk. Here's a small snippet of code that shows how to use the QueueBrowser

IQueueBrowser browser = session.CreateBrowser((IQueue)destination);
IEnumerator enumeration = browser.GetEnumerator();

while(enumeration.MoveNext())
{
IMessage message = (IMessage) enumeration.Current();

// ...Do something with the message
}

Since the QueueBrowser returns a .NET IEnumerator instance it also supplies a Reset method that essentially just recreates the Browser session and restarts the Browse from the beginning.

Let us know if you find any bugs!

Just finished implementing QueueBrowser support in ActiveMQ-CPP

2010-03-16T08:33:00.001-07:00

I just finished implementing the CMS QueueBrowser for ActiveMQ-CPP, it required me to make some changes to the QueueBrowser interface that was there but I think it was worth it. The JMS QueueBrowser uses an Enumeration returned from the JMS QueueBrowser as the way to browse Messages in JMS, so to keep things similar I created the CMS MessageEnumeration interface.

To use the QueueBrowser from CMS you just create a new QueueBrowser instance using your Session object and then get a MessageEnumeration when you want to browse the contents of the Queue. Here's a small snippet of code to demonstrate how its done.

std::auto_ptr browser = session->createQueueBrowser( queue );

// Enumerations are owned by the browser so don't delete or put in an auto_ptr
MessageEnumeration* enumeration = browser->getEnumeration();

while( enumeration->hasMoreMessages() ) {
cms::Message* message = enumeration->nextMessage();

// ... Do something with the Message

delete message;
}

browser->close();

The QueueBrowser is implemented in the ActiveMQ-CPP trunk.

ActiveMQ-CPP now supports Message body compression

2010-03-11T05:43:00.001-08:00

If you download the latest source from SVN you will find that you can now set the useCompression option on the Connection URI and your Message bodies will be compressed using a Java compatible ZLib deflater. This allows you to reduce larger payloads for faster transmission on the wire and should be fully compatible with the AMQ Java client and with the NMS.ActiveMQ client if you use the DotNetZip library in a compression policy, more about that later.

Added SSL support to NMS.ActiveMQ today

2010-02-25T13:28:00.000-08:00

I spent the last couple days trying to decipher MS documentation on SSL support and finally figured out enough to get basic SSL support working in NMS.ActiveMQ. No bells and whistles yet in the SSL transport but it seems to work fine with AMQ so I'm happy. Would love it if some users would checkout trunk and give it a spin, let me know what you find and what you think needs fixed / added.

ActiveMQ-CPP 3.1.1 Released

2010-02-20T06:19:00.000-08:00

ActiveMQ-CPP 3.1.1 was just released. This is a patch release so there's no API changes or other major internal changes, just a few memory leak fixes that should help to improve overall stability. Grab your copy today from here:

Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ v1.2.0 officially released.

2010-02-12T07:25:00.000-08:00

Finally, the release of Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ 1.2.0 is done. This version is a major update over 1.1.0 and include a lot of great new features as well as many fixes. You can download the source or binary bundles from here.

Changes in this version include:

Support for ConnectionMeteData in the Connection API.
Supports the new Individual Acknowledge Mode.
New IStreamMessage support
New IRedeliveryPolicy interface and PrefecthPolicy support.
Expanded IByteMessage interface to read/write primitive types.
Message's adhere to the JMS Read only and Write only rules.
Many new Unit Tests added to the Test Suite.
Support for Message Body Compression.
Connection Inactivity Monitor.
Optional Asynchronous Reconnects in the Failover Transport.
Optional Timeouts for Dispose and Close of Sessions.
Many more bugfixes and improvements as well.

First Release of NMS.Stomp is out.

2010-02-08T05:47:00.000-08:00

Apache.NMS.Stomp v1.2.0 is now official, you can download the source and binary distributions here. This client is built on the v1.2.0 NMS API and requires that you download the binary distribution of NMS 1.2.0 as well.

The .NET Stomp client supports the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and above and supports much of the NMS API. Support for MapMessage is implemented using XML and ActiveMQ's built in message transformation tools for stomp, see here.

First Release Candidate of NMS.Stomp is out.

2010-01-18T07:04:00.000-08:00

The first official release candidate of NMS.Stomp is out, get it here:

This client offers support for the .NET Compact Framework 2.0+ along with the normal .NET 2.0+ and Mono 2.0+ support of the NMS client libs.

RC-2 of Apache.NMS and Apace.NMS.ActiveMQ now available

2009-12-29T11:43:00.000-08:00

I've just finished work on the RC-2 bundles of Apache.NMS and Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ. Release candidate 2 resolves several issues found since the RC-1 version was posted. The bundles are available here

This release adds the Inactivity Monitor to NMS.ActiveMQ which is useful in detecting broken connections quickly which allows the failover transport to recover your connection faster. The inactivity monitor is disabled by default in this RC while we continue to test it, you can enable it by add "transport.useInactivityMonitor=true" to your connection URI. Also several bugs related to transactions and message redelivery were addressed in this release.

ActiveMQ-CPP 3.1.0 Released

2009-12-21T06:33:00.001-08:00

The official release of ActiveMQ-CPP 3.1.0 is ready for download. This new release incorporates several new features and some nice performance improvements. Grab a copy today.

NMS.Stomp Coming together.

2009-12-10T14:35:00.000-08:00

I got the basics all working today in NMS.Stomp. Producers and Consumers are talking to each other nicely and the initial unit tests are all passing. The code still won't build on the .NET Compact Framework but that will come soon enough.

NMS.Stomp

2009-12-07T08:01:00.000-08:00

I started working on NMS.Stomp late last week. This new NMS implementation will provide a much lighter wright NMS client for Stomp compared to the NMS.ActiveMQ module. We plan on making this build for the .NET Compact Framework as well since we removed that from NMS.ActiveMQ.

Gearing up for the ActiveMQ-CPP 3.1 Release

2009-12-07T07:58:00.000-08:00

Took some time over the weekend to update some things on the CMS API Overview page, added info on StreamMessage and the now supported Individual Ack mode. Also added two complete examples to the overview.

I was also able to fix an issue with the ActiveMQ-CPP RC1 code thanks to a report from a user on problems he was having.

I plan on updating the CMS site some more before the 3.1 release to improve our documentation.

ActiveMQ-CPP 3.1.0 RC1 Released Today

2009-12-03T11:20:00.001-08:00

Right on the heels of the NMS 1.2.0 RC1 release comes the ActiveMQ-CPP 3.1.0 RC1 release.

Some of the highlights of this release are the addition of the Inactivity Monitor which allows detection of failed connections much quicker which makes the failover capabilities even more robust than in the 3.0 releases. The Threads code has been rewritten as well and is now much leaner and performs quite a bit better than previous versions. This version also support the Individual Ack mode that was introduced in ActiveMQ 5.2.

Grab a copy of the RC1 source archive from here and start testing it out today!

Apache NMS 1.2.0 RC1 is out

2009-12-02T10:43:00.000-08:00

After several months of hard work we've finally finished the next major release the the Apache NMS clients. The ActiveMQ .NET client has undergone a major rewrite to improve stability and performance. We've added new features like support for the JMS style StreamMessage and much much more.

Check it out today!

You can download the RC1 source and binary packages from here

FUSE Message Broker .NET Client released today!

2009-08-14T08:33:00.000-07:00

FUSE Message Broker .NET Client has just made its first release!

Based on the Apache ActiveMQ .NET / NMS technology, this product allows .NET and C# applications to interoperate seamlessly with existing Java-based FUSE Message Broker deployments.

This initial release (v.1.1) is supported on Windows XP and Server 2003 (both 32- and 64-bit) with .NET 2.0 and up.

Head on over to the FUSE Forge to download it now:

http://mbnet.fusesource.org/

FUSE version of ActiveMQ-CPP now available!

2009-07-20T14:04:00.000-07:00

A new FUSE version of the ActiveMQ C++ client is now available here, this version provides several new examples that aren't available in the Apache release of the C++ client.

Python Client that makes use of ActiveMQ-CPP

2009-07-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

If you've ever wanted to talk to an ActiveMQ broker from Python using the native Openwire protocol in ActiveMQ then I've got just the thing for you, this Python Client for ActiveMQ makes use of ActiveMQ-CPP under the covers and will soon allow you to use the new 3.0 release which will make the Failover functionality available in your app.

And for those of you on Ubuntu, Dejan Bosanac has put together an excellent guide on how to build it on ubuntu.

ActiveMQ-CPP 3.0.1 Released

2009-07-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

This Friday ActiveMQ-CPP 3.0.1 was released. This release fixes some issues that were found in the Failover Transport, and also some minor issues with URI options that weren't getting applied correctly. I highly recommend that anyone using 3.0 move up to 3.0.1.

New ActiveMQ-CPP tutorial posted

2009-06-12T16:47:00.000-07:00

I took some time today to write a short tutorial on how to handle the advisory messages that ActiveMQ can send using the CPP client. Its still a work in progress but comments are welcome.

The tutorial is available here.

ActiveMQ-CPP 3.0 Released

2009-06-12T14:34:00.000-07:00

Finally! ActiveMQ-CPP 3.0 got released today. This release has been in the works for awhile and a lot of the code has been rewritten, simplified and otherwise scrubbed. We now support a Failover Transport and the CMS StreamMessage which mimics the JMS message of the same name.

You can visit the release page for the full list of issues that were addressed here.

ActiveMQ-CPP 3.0 RC2 Released

2009-05-26T13:42:00.000-07:00

I finally got all the tests working on all the platforms I have access to and now there is a new Release Candidate available for ActiveMQ-CPP 3.0. The third release candidate contains a lot of cleaned up API documentation for CMS, and some fixes for issues that we found while doing some more cross platform testing. The one new item in the release is support for the JMS / CMS StreamMessage. Originally the StreamMessage support was slated for a later 3.x release but once I took a look it turned out to be surprisingly simple to implement given all the other goodies we had developed to make the MapMessage work, so I squeezed it into this release.

While generating the new API docs in anticipation of a 3.0 release I found that our doxygen configuration was causing over 300 megabytes of glut. After some tweaking I was able to get rid of a lot of useless diagrams and other odds and ends from the configuration that have scaled it back to around 20 megabytes. That should save on server space at Apache...

Finally, a 3.0 Release Candidate

2009-04-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

Well it felt like it took me forever to get this all put together but I finally have a release candidate for ActiveMQ-CPP 3.0. The first candidate RC0 can be downloaded from the Apache ActiveMQ-CPP website here.

I've tested the release on Fedora 10 and Windows XP both in 32bit and 64bit compiles. Now I need some users to grab it and start testing it out to find the bugs I didn't.

ActiveMQ-CPP Release Candidte

2009-04-16T06:16:00.000-07:00

I've been trying all week to get the CPP client to build cleanly on Windows but still haven't been able to resolve all the DLL build issues, and don't even get me started on 64bit builds. Why is building on Windows always such a pain in the arse?

In the meantime I've resolved a couple of issues that were submitted last week that fix some pretty important things. We had previously written some code to hand sending the C++ strings to the Java broker in the native Modified UTF-8 format that Java uses but we made a mistake and didn't properly encode NULLs or any ASCII character over 127, well that now all fixed. As a bonus I realized that our code was also not taking advantage of the fact that the Openwire processing on the Java side allows for strings to be encoded with a size larger than 65535 bytes for string values in the Message properties not just in the TextMessage payload, so the long standing limit on string length in Message properties is now gone as well.

One other small fix adds the ability to set the max inactivity duration value on the URI and to properly negotiate it with the broker.

So all in all not a bad week as far as improvements to the client goes, now if only this Windows build would finish...

ActiveMQ-CPP 3.0 Right around the corner

2009-04-02T11:24:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of work going on to revamp ActiveMQ-CPP over the past couple of months. The major new feature of course if Failver support, but besides that there's also been a lot of work done to make the code faster and more reliable. The end is in sight, Failover is working now, and most of the open issues are closed. There are a few small tasks remaining as well as a lot of testing to do but the code is now at a point where folks can start using it. I just finished making several fixes to the Transactions handling code and also cleaned up the way Message's are ack'd. If all goes well in my testing I'm hoping to have a release candidate out in another week or so.

Writing a CMS User Guide

2009-02-28T07:33:00.000-08:00

I decided that the CMS page was decidedly lacking in actual documentation on how to use CMS so I've started putting together a user guide / overview of CMS and the ActiveMQ-CPP implementation of CMS. There's not a lot there yet to review, but as always contributions are welcome.

Here's the link.
http://activemq.apache.org/cms/cms-api-overview.html

What's ahead for ActiveMQ-CPP

2009-01-14T11:57:00.000-08:00

ActiveMQ-CPP started out as a Stomp based client for AMQ a couple years ago, since then its grown and evolved to support the native OpenWire protocol used in AMQ along with a slew of other features. Unfortunately its reached a point where the architure that we originally came up with is working against adding new features like Failover support for example. That's why I'm now focusing on a major refactor of the code to correct some of the shortcomings that are standing in the way of new features and also to improve performance and hopefully reliability at the same time.

From this point ou the 2.x branch will only see releases when there's a compelling reason to do so such as a critical fix or other small tweaks that helps someone currently using the library.

The next major release will be version 3.0. What we gain from this will be a much cleaner architecture and hopefully much faster adoption of new features that bring the C++ client closer to feature parity with the Java client. The main new feature targeted for 3.0 is failover support, but hopefully we'll be able to sneak in a few other goodies as well.

Stay Tuned.

Offically Part of the FUSE Team

2008-11-14T12:47:00.000-08:00

I'm now working for Progres Software on the FUSE Open Source team. This means I'm able to work full time on Projects like ActiveMQ-CPP which is soon to part of the FUSE product.

ActiveMQ-CPP

2008-11-05T06:17:00.000-08:00

You can check out my Open Source project ActiveMQ-CPP here: http://activemq.apache.org/cms/