JBoss AS6: get rid off HornetQ and reuse JBossMQ

[ktnagel]

Hi all,

after reading a lot of thing i didnt care of, and many tries in vain, let me ask a (possibly stupid) question:

can i get get rid off HornetQ and reuse JBossMQ in JBoss AS6 ?  How to do that?

in my eyes the new Hornet stuff simply doesnt work well (if at all) with MDBs

Any ideas?

regards from germany,

thomas nagel

[jaikiran]

Do you really mean JBoss MQ (a old and outdated project) or do you mean JBoss Messaging?

In any case, (except for one major issue) I haven't heard of any problems with HornetQ and MDBs. What exactly are you running into?

[ktnagel]

Hello,

thanks for your answer...

JBossMQ or JBoss Messaging - thats a good question. These names have been used interchangeably in the documentation, at least for a mere user of the system.

Well, technically there is surely a way to use HornetQ with MDBs, but the docu doesn't tell what to do to replace the JBoss 4 config, so upto now we don't know how to configure HornetQ. The two documents that were supplied couldn't help us to get a working configuration. So we can't use it  and so we thought of downgrading to the predecessor.

We use the message beans internally and SQL-based, and there is no hint as to how to configure such a situation. Maybe HornetQ wasn't designed for such "trivial" messages.

Regards from germany,

Thomas Nagel

[jaikiran]

Thomas Nagel wrote:

Hello,

thanks for your answer...

JBossMQ or JBoss Messaging - thats a good question. These names have been used interchangeably in the documentation, at least for a mere user of the system.

JBoss MQ is a very old messaging implementation which was used in JBoss AS 4.0.x days (I think till JBoss AS 4.2.2). Then came JBoss Messaging which was a new implementation and was used in JBoss AS 5.x. And recently, JBoss Messaging has been replaced by HornetQ in JBoss AS6.

Thomas Nagel wrote:

Well, technically there is surely a way to use HornetQ with MDBs, but the docu doesn't tell what to do to replace the JBoss 4 config, so upto now we don't know how to configure HornetQ. The two documents that were supplied couldn't help us to get a working configuration. So we can't use it  and so we thought of downgrading to the predecessor.

I'm not sure which part of the configurations are you having problems with. The MDB configurations are going to remain the same irrespective of whether it's a HornetQ or JBoss Messaging. The configurations that'll change are the queue/topic setup ones. Is that what you are having problems with?

Thomas Nagel wrote:

We use the message beans internally and SQL-based, and there is no hint as to how to configure such a situation. Maybe HornetQ wasn't designed for such "trivial" messages.

HornetQ (unlike JBoss MQ and JBoss Messaging) doesn't use database to store the messages. It has its own custom "journal" for persistence. What exactly were the SQLs that you were using with JBoss Messaging?

[jaikiran]

And just in case you missed the documentation, HornetQ has a comprehensive documentation here http://www.jboss.org/hornetq/docs (2.1.2.Final is the version being used in JBoss AS 6.0.0.Final).

[jaikiran]

And to get back to your original question - In theory it should be possible to switch back to JBoss Messaging in JBoss AS6. Infact, up until some specific milestone release, JBoss AS6 used to ship with JBoss Messaging. However, it would need some efforts to make sure that you configure JBoss AS6 with the right set of JBoss Messaging configurations and jars. I don't think anyone has tried this against AS6. So I won't be surprised to find no documentation on how to do this. So it's going to be a trial and error effort.

[ktnagel]

Hello Jaikiran,

thanks for your time and effort. But honestly, I still don't know what is the best way and the least work to get our MDBs running again.

We used MDBs to communicate asynchronously between session beans, to schedule tasks.

If i understood it right then the HornetQ service grew way beyond the simple messaging between sessions in the same EAR on the same server. So it can serve purposes that go far beyond our demands. Enhancing a service is a good thing of course. It made confuiguration a bit more difficult, perhaps inevitably. And maybe the excitement of being able to fulfil so many difficult and important tasks lead the authors of the documentation to keeping the explanations of such simple tasks as ours a bit short and hard to grasp.

I've looked over the HornetQ user manual chapters 32 ff, and haven't understood it all. The sheer volume of the book takes time, and I'm still unsure whether it will be possible to do what we need with it.

So it's not out of the fun of being subversive that i asked about downgrading back to the former messaging system. I hoped it could be easy to use it as it was, but your view made it sound rather try-the-next-error, rather hard to tell whether it will work at all.

Maybe we will remove MDBs from the app for this reason. They are not vital for the app. If ever we have time to advance our session beans to ejb3 we could also use asynchronous session bean calls instead. In other projects i've also put tasks to do later in a database table, thats much easier to handle.

Regards from Germany,

Thomas Nagel