The JmsTemplate class is the central class in the JMS core package. It simplifies the use of JMS since it handles the creation and release of resources when sending or synchronously recieving messages.

Code that uses the JmsTemplate only needs to implement callback interfaces giving them a clearly defined high level contract. The MessageCreator callback interface creates a message given a Session provided by the calling code in JmsTemplate. In order to allow for more complex usage of the JMS API, the callback SessionCallback provides the user with the JMS session and the callback ProducerCallback exposes a Session and MessageProducer pair.

The JMS API exposes two types of send methods, one that takes delivery mode, priority, and time-to-live as Quality of Service (QOS) parameters and one that takes no QOS parameters which uses default values. Since there are many send methods in JmsTemplate, the setting of the QOS parameters have been exposed as bean properties to avoid duplication in the number of send methods. Similarly, the timeout value for synchronous receive calls is set using the property setReceiveTimeout.

Some JMS providers allow the setting of default QOS values administratively through the configuration of the ConnectionFactory. This has the effect that a call to MessageProducer's send method send(Destination destination, Message message) will use different QOS default values than those specified in the JMS specification. In order to provide consistent management of QOS values, the JmsTemplate must therefore be specifically enabled to use its own QOS values by setting the boolean property isExplicitQosEnabled to true.

	Note
	Instances of the JmsTemplate class are thread-safe once configured. This is important because it means that you can configure a single instance of a JmsTemplate and then safely inject this shared reference into multiple collaborators. To be clear, the JmsTemplate is stateful, in that it maintains a reference to a ConnectionFactory, but this state is not conversational state.

The JmsTemplate requires a reference to a ConnectionFactory. The ConnectionFactory is part of the JMS specification and serves as the entry point for working with JMS. It is used by the client application as a factory to create connections with the JMS provider and encapsulates various configuration parameters, many of which are vendor specific such as SSL configuration options.

When using JMS inside an EJB, the vendor provides implementations of the JMS interfaces so that they can participate in declarative transaction management and perform pooling of connections and session. In order to use this implementation, Java EE containers typically require that you declare a JMS connection factory as a resource-ref inside the EJB or servlet deployment descriptors. To ensure the use of these features with the JmsTemplate inside an EJB, the client application should ensure that it references the managed implementation of the ConnectionFactory.

ConnectionFactory->Connection->Session->MessageProducer->send

Destinations, like ConnectionFactories, are JMS administered objects that can be stored and retrieved in JNDI. When configuring a Spring application context you can use the JNDI factory class JndiObjectFactoryBean / <jee:jndi-lookup> to perform dependency injection on your object's references to JMS destinations. However, often this strategy is cumbersome if there are a large number of destinations in the application or if there are advanced destination management features unique to the JMS provider. Examples of such advanced destination management would be the creation of dynamic destinations or support for a hierarchical namespace of destinations. The JmsTemplate delegates the resolution of a destination name to a JMS destination object to an implementation of the interface DestinationResolver. DynamicDestinationResolver is the default implementation used by JmsTemplate and accommodates resolving dynamic destinations. A JndiDestinationResolver is also provided that acts as a service locator for destinations contained in JNDI and optionally falls back to the behavior contained in DynamicDestinationResolver.

Quite often the destinations used in a JMS application are only known at runtime and therefore cannot be administratively created when the application is deployed. This is often because there is shared application logic between interacting system components that create destinations at runtime according to a well-known naming convention. Even though the creation of dynamic destinations are not part of the JMS specification, most vendors have provided this functionality. Dynamic destinations are created with a name defined by the user which differentiates them from temporary destinations and are often not registered in JNDI. The API used to create dynamic destinations varies from provider to provider since the properties associated with the destination are vendor specific. However, a simple implementation choice that is sometimes made by vendors is to disregard the warnings in the JMS specification and to use the TopicSession method createTopic(String topicName) or the QueueSession method createQueue(String queueName) to create a new destination with default destination properties. Depending on the vendor implementation, DynamicDestinationResolver may then also create a physical destination instead of only resolving one.

The boolean property pubSubDomain is used to configure the JmsTemplate with knowledge of what JMS domain is being used. By default the value of this property is false, indicating that the point-to-point domain, Queues, will be used. This property is used by JmsTemplate determines the behavior of dynamic destination resolution via implementations of the DestinationResolver interface.

You can also configure the JmsTemplate with a default destination via the property defaultDestination. The default destination will be used with send and receive operations that do not refer to a specific destination.

One of the most common uses of JMS messages in the EJB world is to drive message-driven beans (MDBs). Spring offers a solution to create message-driven POJOs (MDPs) in a way that does not tie a user to an EJB container. (See Section 21.4.2, “Asynchronous Reception - Message-Driven POJOs” for detailed coverage of Spring's MDP support.)

A message listener container is used to receive messages from a JMS message queue and drive the MessageListener that is injected into it. The listener container is responsible for all threading of message reception and dispatches into the listener for processing. A message listener container is the intermediary between an MDP and a messaging provider, and takes care of registering to receive messages, participating in transactions, resource acquisition and release, exception conversion and suchlike. This allows you as an application developer to write the (possibly complex) business logic associated with receiving a message (and possibly responding to it), and delegates boilerplate JMS infrastructure concerns to the framework.

There are three standard JMS message listener containers packaged with Spring, each with its specialised feature set.

Spring provides a JmsTransactionManager that manages transactions for a single JMS ConnectionFactory. This allows JMS applications to leverage the managed transaction features of Spring as described in Chapter 10, Transaction Management. The JmsTransactionManager performs local resource transactions, binding a JMS Connection/Session pair from the specified ConnectionFactory to the thread. JmsTemplate automatically detects such transactional resources and operates on them accordingly.

In a Java EE environment, the ConnectionFactory will pool Connections and Sessions, so those resources are efficiently reused across transactions. In a standalone environment, using Spring's SingleConnectionFactory will result in a shared JMS Connection, with each transaction having its own independent Session. Alternatively, consider the use of a provider-specific pooling adapter such as ActiveMQ's PooledConnectionFactory class.

JmsTemplate can also be used with the JtaTransactionManager and an XA-capable JMS ConnectionFactory for performing distributed transactions. Note that this requires the use of a JTA transaction manager as well as a properly XA-configured ConnectionFactory! (Check your Java EE server's / JMS provider's documentation.)

Reusing code across a managed and unmanaged transactional environment can be confusing when using the JMS API to create a Session from a Connection. This is because the JMS API has only one factory method to create a Session and it requires values for the transaction and acknowledgement modes. In a managed environment, setting these values is the responsibility of the environment's transactional infrastructure, so these values are ignored by the vendor's wrapper to the JMS Connection. When using the JmsTemplate in an unmanaged environment you can specify these values through the use of the properties sessionTransacted and sessionAcknowledgeMode. When using a PlatformTransactionManager with JmsTemplate, the template will always be given a transactional JMS Session.