C++ and JMS - how to connect the two?

Question

I am a novice in C++, but have a lot of experience in Java EE.

I need to write a small app which is heavily asynchronous. It receives data from HTTP and stores it in a Queue (it needs to have guaranteed delivery and very high throughput), something like ActiveMQ or OpenMQ, maybe via JMS.

Then another C++ app/listener takes out data from the Queue (through some Listener which is activated by the Queue directly, not by my pooling), connects to a MySQL database and does some business logic calculations and sends the message to another Queue.

In Java EE this would be a web app that would send messages to a JMS queue. Message-Driven Beans would be consumers of these messages in an EJB module, and a Session EJB would send messages to the outgoing JMS queue.

Can someone with C++ experience please explain some basics to me:

1. Is JMS the only option for C++ for guaranteed delivery Queues? Do you suggest ActiveMQ or something else, having in mind that the message Consumer would be in C++.

2. Do I need to create some kind of a multi-threaded daemon in C++ that listens for Queue messages, or is this thread creation (message consumption) part of ActiveMQ's implementation of C+ consumers?

Any other suggestions on how to implement the scenario above would be very much appreciated.

EDITED: I would prefer a message broker and client to be in C++. ActiveMQ is a Java product, which is not really what we need.

Answer 1

1 - JMS - Java Message Service - is just an API reference for Java and Java only. There is no standard in messaging that applies to C++ except for AMQP (which is, to my opinion, not really working cross implementation as good as it should). To C++ you kinda have to rely on specific vendor libraries for each message broker implementation.

Suggestions of implementations:

• ActiveMQ - It has a nice C++ API (Called CMS) which is modeled and named after JMS - so you will feel familiar with the API. The main broker will run on Java non the less - might be the simplest choice.

• IBM WebSphere MQ - Not open source, enterprise class broker that runs native (written in C), and has C++ libraries. Rather nice when you get over the learning curve and the price does not matter.

• RabbitMQ - Very popular reliable messaging with high performance and open source. Has C++ client libs but is written in Erlang and runs within the erlang/otp runtime.

• Apache QPID - Less known AMQP/JMS broker. Comes in two flavours server side, Java and C++ where the C++ broker has better performance. Comes with C++ client libs.

2 - For multi threading, the JMS specs does not really come with a solution either. It's more like the Java EE container (or Spring Framework) that simply wrapps the management of threads and relieves the developer from it. ActiveMQ does not come with much more than a few support classes in this case and as far as I know, none of the other vendor libraries does either. So, look for some library that wrapps threading (I have no clue) or deal with the consumer threads yourself. It shouldn't all that messy, done right.