JBoss Messaging 1.3.0.GA released
I am pleased to announce JBoss Messaging 1.3.0.GA has been released!
(This has been renamed from 1.2.0.SP2 to better follow the JBosss versioning guidelines).
This is an important release, the main theme of which is better useability for JBoss Messaging users, and better integration in JBoss Application Server.
Previous releases of JBoss Messaging used different versions of various thirdparty jars compared to JBoss Application Server. This meant, that when running JBoss Messaging inside the app server it was either necessary to do a "scoped" deployment, where JBoss Messaging is configured to run in its own classloading domain, or to copy the newer jars into the application server, overwriting what was previously there.
Scoped deployments introduced a whole slew of issues, not least of which is they are very difficult to configure and meant that other services using JBoss Messaging had to specify the classloading domain. This resulted in a lot of headaches for our users. Overwriting jars in the application server came with its own problems and gave incompatibilties with other services e.g. EJB3 and web services, and also gave support issues since the user was now using a version of the AS with a customer configuration of jars - something that's hard to support.
Another compatibility issue we previously had was that the jboss-messaging-client.jar packaged up all its dependent libraries in it. This caused problems with users who wanted to use different versions of jars, e.g. log4j.jar.
With JBoss Messaging 1.3.0.GA, the product is no longer deployed as scoped deployment, and we now supply a thin client jar. The installation guide describes what other jars you will need on your client classpath to get it to work (not many). We have ensured that JBoss Messaging 1.3.0.GA and JBoss AS 4.2.0.GA have their dependencies all aligned, this means JBoss Messaging works smoothly with 4.2.0.GA, but also that we no longer recommend (in fact we highly recommend against) installing JBoss Messaging in earlier versions of JBoss AS. You can probably get JBoss Messaging to work in JBoss AS 4.0.x, but we don't guarantee you won't have issues with compatibility with other services, in particular clustering, EJB3 and web services.
Clustering in JBoss Messaging 1.3.0.GA now runs in the "all" configuration, unlike previous versions which had difficulty running in "all".
From now on we are going to keep our dependencies aligned with the application server which may mean the latest version of JBoss Messaging will only work with the latest version of JBAS. This makes a lot of sense, since before very long, JBoss Messaging is going to be the default JMS provider for JBoss AS, so it will be an intrinsic part of the application server.
This release also includes many important bug fixes - please see the release notes for full details, it also includes some new functionality like an implementation of clustered JMS temporary queues.
We also have changed the clustering behaviour a little. The default connection factories at /ConnectionFactory and /XAConnectionFactory are now *non clustered*, i.e. they don't support automatic failover or automatic connection load balancing. This is to provide better compatibility with applications originally written against JBoss MQ which don't expect load-balancing or automatic failover. If you want a clustered connection factory, one is available at /ClusteredConnectionFactory, or you can deploy your own. See the userguide for more details.
We have also expanded the documentation in this release, and produced a section on how to use the message bridge, which was there in JBoss Messaging 1.2.0 but undocumented, so no-one knew how to use it!
Similarly there is a new section on how to enable XA transaction recovery with JBoss Messaging.
We have also created a couple of new examples - one demonstrating the message bridge in action, and another demonstrating using HAJNDI to talk to a clustered EJB which talks to JBoss Messaging.
The year ahead will be an exciting time for JBoss Messaging, as it will become the default JMS provider in JBoss AS, and is also a key part of Red Hat's messaging strategy - which we will have more to say about over the next few weeks!
Stay tuned, and thanks most of all to you, our users.
Full release notes are available here: http://jira.jboss.com/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=12310061&styleName=Html&version=12311353
