I wanted to quickly check out the Message Selector feature of JMS and decided to try it on Active MQ.

The installation of Active MQ on Windows was painless - just unzip and run the batch file and it started. To run the examples, one needs to have ant installed. Run the ant build.xml that is available in the example folder. The examples provided cover basic point to point (queue based) messaging and publish-subscribe. Default values are provided in the build.xml file so there is no need to create queues or topics just to have a run.

To set and consume messages with properties (selectors), I edited the sample producer and consumer files and they worked perfectly fine. The examples use the ActiveMQConnectionFactory class but I'd imagine that changing to JNDI would not be a big deal.

I also had a look at the web examples where REST-style messaging was supported through a servlet provided. It provided the contents of a queue as XML messages, RSS and ATOM feeds, very handy for legacy-web integration.

In summary, though I spent only a short time with the product, I thought it was easy to install and use. The examples using the default objects helped a lot. This review is only a Java developer's view of Active MQ. In order to get a complete perspective of the product, one would need to look at installing it on a production server, configuring it for load balancing, scalability etc and then give an opinion.