Virtual Destinations

Virtual Destinations allow ActiveMQ admins to create logical destinations that clients can use to produce and consume from but which map onto one or more physical destinations. It allows us to provide more flexible loosely coupled messaging configurations.

The idea behind publish subscribe is a great one. Allow producers to be decoupled from consumers so that they do not even know how many consumers are interested in the messages they publish.

A JMS durable subscriber MessageConsumer is created with a unique JMS clientID and durable subscriber name. To be JMS compliant only one JMS connection can be active at any point in time for one JMS clientID, and only one consumer can be active for a clientID and subscriber name. i.e., only one thread can be actively consuming from a given logical topic subscriber. This means we cannot implement:

• load balancing of messages.

• fast failover of the subscriber if that one process running that one consumer thread dies.

Now queue semantics in JMS offer the ability to load balance work across a number of consumers in a reliable way - allowing many threads, processes and machines to be used to process messages. Then we have sophisticated sticky load balancing techniques like Message Groups to load balance and parallelise work while maintaining ordering.
Another added benefit of having physical queues for each logical topic subscriber is we can them monitor the queue depths via JMX to monitor system performance together with being able to browse these physical queues.