JMS Queue and Topic

[Natalie Kopple]

Would someone help me to understand when we would use queue versus topic and vice versa? and why would someone use a queue with multiple consumers? Thank you.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

In a queue, only one destination gets the message and in a topic all subscribers get it. A queue with multiple consumers could be used for redundancy.

[Natalie Kopple]

Thanks Jeanne for your help. I did some homework and also would like to answer my own question.

Using a queue with multiple consumers usually makes sense when different consumers are responsible for processing messages containing the same headers (often generated by the same producer) written onto the same queue. For instance, message selectors could be used in a trading application, to differentiate between buy and sell orders, when the producer is incapable of writing the JMS messages onto two separate buy and sell queues.

When multiple consumers use the same queue, message selectors need to be configured correctly across these consumers so that there is no conflict in determining the intended consumer.

In the case of message-driven-beans (a consumer of JMS messages), the selector can be specified in the ejb-jar.xml file thereby allowing for the configuration to be done at deployment time (instead of the opposing view of specifying the message selector during development).