Active JMS / News: Recent posts

I am now prepared to start work on ActiveJMS.NET which will be a brand new release based on the Sun 1.4.2 packager. It will, furthermore, eliminate the "flat" API in favor of a fully OO API which will mirror the JMS common API with some minor changes to make it look more COM-like. Furthermore, this release WILL WORK WITH .NET! Stay tuned for this release which should come soon.

I have just committed changes that make ActiveJMS work with the new ActiveX Packager that ships with JSDK 1.4.2 and above. While I'm pleased that Sun has recommitted to the development of this tool, I did run into some unpleasant surprises.

The old packager allowed you to use your generated bean as an ActiveX object with early binding. The new tool, however, doesn't provide this functionality. Therefore, you cannot use the WithEvents keyword in languages like Visual Basic making Active JMS pretty worthless. However, you can use it as an ActiveX Control which provides very stable support for events etc. In fact, I'm quite pleased with the stability of the new bridge in this respect. Anyway, I have not made a "release" of this code, but it is indeed in CVS. So, if you need to do JMS from a COM language (sadly not .NET) using JDK 1.4.2 then this is the code for you. Building it is very easy thanks to Ant.... read more

The new ActiveX Bridge has been made available by Sun with the Java 2 SDK 1.4.2 beta release. I am working on modifying the build script for Active JMS to get it running on the new bridge. I have run into a few issues, but I'm excited about the possibility of getting a stable and functional ActiveX Bridge.

As many of you know, Active JMS is currently not supported on JDK 1.3.1_03 or above due to issues with Sun's Active X Packager tool. Additionally, this tool was completely removed with the release of JDK 1.4. However, Sun has just closed bug #4616580 with a status of fixed. The new Active X Packager tool will be included in JDK 1.4.2. I'm currently unaware of when it JDK 1.4.2 is scheduled for release, but as soon as the beta is out, I'll begin working on a new release of Active JMS to support the new tool. I'm also hopeful that this will also fix the issues with handling events in .NET.

As many of you know, Sun dropped support for the Active X Bridge in JDK 1.4 due to "lack of customer interest, bugs, and the fact that JDK 1.4 was a new code base. However, as indicated by the large number of comments attached to this bug, it looks as if Sun may indeed reinstate it for JDK 1.5. If you want Active JMS to work in the future, please do me a favor and go vote for bug number 4616580 on the Sun Bug Parade website. Here is the link: http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/bugParade/bugs/4616580.html

I am very excited to announce that I have released an updated version of the active-jms.jar file that fixes two issues. One of these issues has been plaguing Active JMS since its pre 1.0 release. It was causing Active JMS to throw a fatal exception when used from more than one thread. This made it impossible to use Active JMS from Active Server Pages for example. Thanks to efforts of an anonymous individual (if you read this please let me know who you are so I can give you the proper credit due), this issue has now been fixed. This means you should now be able to use Active JMS from ASP, as well as from multiple threads. To implement this fix, simply download the active-jms.jar file in the 1.02 release and replace the active-jms.jar file currently found in your %JRE%/lib/ext directory.

I was recently contacted by and individual who was running into all sorts of problems with Active JMS. After several e-mails we discovered that it was the JRE. In other words, Active JMS doesn't appear to work on JRE 1.3.1_03 or above. I don't know why, but I plan to look into it in the future.

Thanks to Christian Oetterli, we now have a C++ sample available. This sample properly handles the COM events (onMessage, and onException). A special thanks goes out to Christian for making this available.

The long awaited 1.0 release of Active JMS is now available. No significant changes were made, but the interface did change because of the addition of two methods. As such, any applications compiled that utalize an older version will need to be recompiled with this version.

It has been a couple of months since the 0.9 was released and I wanted to update everyone on the status of Active JMS.

I was very happy with the 0.9 release. I did a lot of testing and I thought the documentation was quite good. Based upon the correspondence I have received I seem to have been right. The emails can generally be broken into three categories.

1.) Problems with Active JMS running on machines with JBuilder. I'm not 100% clear on the actual issue, but I have confirmed that Active JMS doesn't seem to like the JRE that JBuilder installs by default. JBuilder hijacks the registry and sets the default JDK to the one distributed with it. If you install Active JMS on a machine with JBuilder you may run into problems. If you uninstall Active JMS, and change the registry entry for the JRE to point to your REAL JRE. Then reinstall Active JMS. Im confident youll see things start working again. I hope to have more information for the 1.0 release.... read more

I am happy to announce that the next release of Active JMS is now available for download. It contains many fixes and enhancements. Additionally it includes many samples in Visual Basic and Python.

Also included in this release is a Quick Start guide. It contains all the information you need to start taking advantages of JMS from any ActiveX enabled programming language.

Installation is as easy as running the exe and dropping your JMS provider's JAR in your JRE extension directory.... read more

I just committed most of the changes I plan on making for the next release. Now, I just need to organize the samples a bit better, and complete the "Getting Started" document I've been working on. After that, I will have completed everything I wanted to get done for the next release with the exception of the C# examples. I know I promised them, but the fact that C# is in beta makes things a bit more complex (like the fact that I've got code that works on one machine but not the other). So, what we'll have is Visual Basic and Python examples for now. Only a few more days...

I have made a lot of changes over the past few days, mainly fixes and needed additions I have discovered while coding some samples. As you will likely notice from the distribution and source itself, I'm not the best about documenting things, so I have decided to provide as many samples as I can.

Currently I'm working on Visual Basic 6.0 samples, C# samples, and even some Python examples.

I would also like to put together several pre-configured providers for use with plain-Jane installs of some of the most popular JMS providers.... read more

The initial release of Active JMS is now available! This is a beta quality release minus the documentation. The install should set up pretty much everything for you with the exception of adding your JMS provider's JAR file to the ext directory of your JRE. Currently, the recommended JRE is 1.3.0 as the ActiveX Packager tool (sun.beans.ole.Packager) included some new bugs as of JRE 1.3.0_1.

Once the install is complete and you have copied your JMS provider's JAR file in the ext directory of your JRE (lib/ext), you can then give it a whirl from an ActiveX enabled language. The version independent program Id is 'ActiveJMS.Client'. Good Luck!