Is there a free JMS implementations that doesn't suck?

[David Weitzman]

JORAM looked promising, but it turns out to suck (can't use the XML parser in Java 1.4, requires an outdated version of log4j plus a bunch of other jars, documentation isn't useful, etc.). OpenJMS doesn't seem to be popular enough to trust. Sun's reference implementation is tied to all their other J2EE stuff (although fortunately their JMX one wasn't).
So anyway...is there a free JMS implementations that doesn't suck?

[Andres Gonzalez]

I've used OpenJMS and I liked it. I've also used JBoss.. have you tried it?

[David Weitzman]

Actually JBossMQ is what I'm looking into now. Unfortunately it seems the JBoss people maintain modularity for development purposes only and don't give you much help trying to set it up for non-JBoss stuff (although they'll tell you it can be done if you ask).

[William Brogden]

I just did a search at Yahoo for OpenJMS and got quite a few hits. It doesn't look like an orphan tech to me.
Bill

[David Weitzman]

I've already started setting up to use JBoss since I get JMX support too.
The things that made me think OpenJMS may be dead/dying were:
- Dead links (to mailing list archives, examples in the QuickStart guide, probably other places).
- the low numbers at the sourceforge project page. CVS Commits, bugs, public forums, etc.
JBoss seems to be on the poor side when it comes to documentation (at least when you don't pay them), but I've asked two questions in their forum and received answers to both. I submitted a third one just a few minutes ago. Admittedly, I prefer well documented software that 'just works', but JBoss looks like it works smoothly once you understand it -- and understanding it may be useful in this J2EE crazy age.

[David Weitzman]

Looking inside the OpenJMS CVS, though, I see that quite a few changes were made before they moved it to sourceforge in late May.
[ September 02, 2002: Message edited by: David Weitzman ]

[David Weitzman]

JBoss has actually got me pretty annoyed right now. I think I may end up using Avalon and OpenJMS. I hope phoenixjms works.

[William Brogden]

I see that PhoenixJMS is a "SAR" implementation. I seem to be suffering from acronym overload - whats an SAR?

[David Weitzman]

I don't know the SAR format yet (the Avalon developers appear active, but are not fans of document writing), but it's seems to be like a .jar or .war or .ear or (insert \.[a-z]ar here) for delopying services on the Phoenix framework from Jakarta -- which is part of the Avalon projects.
Phoenix, I gather, is a tool for managing any sort of component that has a lifecycle (things like start, stop, suspend, etc.) and may or may not depend/be depended on by another Pheonix service (the configuration allows dependancy management and there's probably a JNDI-like object directory).
JBoss can do the same sort of thing (although it seems to have a more general interface) but I had some problems configuring it:
I thought JBoss would be cool because it can manage services that may or may not depend on each other with dependancies and that have simple lifecycles. A JMS service already exists is integrated very well (JBossMQ). The problem is that JBoss comes with several server configurations (minimal (nothing), default (full J2EE I think), and all (J2EE + the kitchen sink)). I just wanted to copy the JMS configuration and .jars from the 'default' server to the 'minimal' one so my own program wouldn't be wasting processor power on EJB containers and stuff. Setting up all the dependancies for security with JBossMQ in the 'minimal' server turned out to be more complicated than I can handle.
The Avalon people, as I mentioned, do not keep their web sites up to date -- I just hope that it works and I can figure it out.