JMS - Introduction
What is JMS?
The term JMS stands for Java Message Service, a Java API which acts as a interface between applications to create, send, receive and read messages between them.
History
Java Message Service is developed by Sun Microsystems as a part of Java Platform Enterprise Edition. The first version of JMS i.e. JMS 1.0.2b was released in June 26, 2001. The stable version of JMS is JMS 2.0 released in May 21, 2013.
Why to use JMS?
JMS is a messaging service which provides reliable and asynchronous communication to implement the messaging system between Java based applications and software components. The JMS API provides set of interfaces to communicate with Java programs and also defines standard messaging protocols to support the Java programming language.
Features
It provides support for messaging applications in J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) technology to interact with other applications.
It provides a common interface to communicate with messaging implementations.
The application developed with JMS API, can be deployed in any JMS provider software.
Developers can easily create messaging enterprise applications by quickly learning JMS API.
Advantages
It is an asynchronous system, which delivers the messages to a client as they arrive and it does not have to request to receive a message. When the messages are available, they will reach to the client automatically.
It is a determined messaging service in which it facilitates that a message will be delivered to destination system only once, so that you can create reliable applications easily.
It allows exchanging and using information between other Java Platform languages such as Scala and Groovy.
Disadvantages
If you send header and other information along with the message content, then it leads to increase in network traffic as the total amount of information becomes larger than the message content itself.
If you forward the message to receivers via server, then the communication will get slower than direct communication.