How can I handle multiple messages concurrently from a JMS topic (not queue) with java and spring 3.0?

Question

Note that I\'d like multiple message listeners to handle successive messages from the topic concurrently. In addition I\'d like each message listener to operate transaction

Answer 1

This is one of those occasions where the differences in transport providers bubble up through the abstraction of JMS. JMS wants to provide a copy of the message for each subscriber on a topic. But the behavior that you want is really that of a queue. I suspect that there are other requirements driving this to a pub/sub solution which were not described - for example other things need to subscribe to the same topic independent of your app.

If I were to do this in WebSphere MQ the solution would be to create an administrative subscription which would result in a single copy of each message on the given topic to be placed onto a queue. Then your multiple subscribers could compete for messages on that queue. This way your app could have multiple threads among which the messages are distributed, and at the same time other subscribers independent of this application could dynamically (un)subscribe to the same topic.

Unfortunately, there's no generic JMS-portable way of doing this. You are dependent on the transport provider's implementation to a great degree. The only one of these I can speak to is WebSphere MQ but I'm sure other transports support this in one way or another and to varying degrees if you are creative.