The Java Message Service

Java Message Service, part of the J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) suite, provides standard APIs that Java developers can use to access the common features of enterprise message systems. JMS supports the publish/subscribe and point-to-point models and allows the creation of message types consisting of arbitrary Java objects.

Design Goals

A fundamental design goal of JMS is to provide a consistent set of interfaces that messaging system clients can use independent of the underlying message system provider.

This way, not only are client applications portable across machine architectures and operating systems, they're also portable across messaging products. Client applications written to JMS will work without modification on all JMS compliant messaging systems. (This can be compared to the independence of Enterprise Java Beans components on the underlying middleware where the components run.)

JMS was also designed to:

• Minimize the effort required by messaging system providers to implement the JMS APIs for their products.
• Provide most of the functionality of common messaging systems.

Many messaging system vendors have implemented JMS for their products, allowing Java access to the functionality of their systems.