Preview of Java Message Service 2.0 over AMQP on Azure Service Bus

Microsoft wants to empower its customers to lift and shift their Java and Spring workloads to Azure, while also helping them to modernize their application stack with best-in-class enterprise messaging in the cloud. Toward that end, Redmond recently announced preview support for Java Message Service (JMS) 2.0 over AMQP in Azure Service Bus premium tier.

The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open standard application layer protocol for passing business messages among apps or organizations. It comprises an efficient wire protocol that separates the network transport from broker architectures and management. AMQP version 1.0 supports a range of broker architectures that may be used to receive, queue, route, and deliver messages, or used peer-to-peer.

Microsoft's Azure Service Bus is a fully managed enterprise integration message broker that can decouple applications and services. It's used to connect applications, devices, and services running in the cloud, and often acts as a messaging backbone for cloud-based apps.

Microsoft program manager Ashish Chhabria announced the support in a blog post.

"The enterprise messaging ecosystem has been largely fragmented compared to the data ecosystem until the recent AMQP 1.0 protocol standardization in 2011 that drove consistent behavior across all enterprise message brokers guaranteed by the protocol implementation," Chhabria wrote. "However, this still did not lead to a standardized API contract, perpetuating the fragmentation in the enterprise messaging space.

"The Java Enterprise community (and by extension, Spring) has made some forward strides with the Java Message Service (JMS 1.1 and 2.0) specification to standardize the API utilized by producer and consumer applications when interacting with an enterprise messaging broker. The Apache QPID community furthered this by its implementation of the JMS API specification over AMQP. QPID-JMS, whether standalone or as part of the Spring JMS package, is the de-facto JMS implementation for most enterprise customers working with a variety of message brokers."

In this preview, Azure Service Bus supports all JMS API contracts, Chhabria said, enabling customers to bring their existing apps to Azure without rewriting them. The list of JMS feature supported today includes:

• Queues.
• Topics.
• Temporary queues.
• Temporary topics.
• Subscriptions.
• Shared durable subscriptions.
• Shared non-durable subscriptions.
• Unshared durable subscriptions.
• Unshared non-durable subscriptions.
• QueueBrowser.
• TopicBrowser.
• Auto-creation of all the above entities (if they don't already exist).
• Message selectors.
• Sending messages with delivery delay (scheduled messages).

To connect an existing JMS based application with Azure Service Bus, Chhabria explained, simply add the Azure Service Bus JMS Maven package or the Azure Service Bus starter for Spring boot to the application's pom.xml and add the Azure Service Bus connection string to the configuration parameters.

Posted by John K. Waters on August 26, 2020