Any kind of integration experience with Weblogic JMS and Oracle AQ?

Question

Hi,
In my company I work with java developers who believe in some kind of "holly" database independence I don't understand and as a result my life as a database developer is hell on earth.. Yesterday we again started to discuss, this time where to log, they believe database is slow and prefer logging to filesystem, after some hours finally I could convince them for some operational and reporting needs to use the database and will do this in an asyncronous way whiich they won't get slow. After all I believe the reason for a database is data, this is the place where data lives, and with the correct desing and implementation logging to database would perform better.
I love Oracle features, and know that we paid a lot for this software, so today I started investigating this promised solution. And quickly I found AQ and JMS topics in the documentation :)
After this introduction here is my problem; my company use BEA Weblogic as application server and the java guys want AQ to automatically (but of course with some delay) take their JMS log requests into database tables. Does any one have similar application experience, or any kind of integration experience with Weblogic JMS and Oracle AQ?
Any comments, references, documentation, sample code, url will be most welcomed :)
Thank you very much!
Tonguc
[email protected]
References I found upto now;
Oracle® Streams Advanced Queuing Java API Reference 10g Release 2 (10.2) http://download-uk.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14291/toc.htm
(Packages; javax.jms & oracle.jms)
Oracle® Streams Advanced Queuing User's Guide and Reference 10g Release 2 (10.2) http://download-uk.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14257/toc.htm
Part IV
Using Oracle JMS and Oracle Streams AQPart V describes how to use Oracle JMS and Oracle Streams Advanced Queuing (AQ).
Chapter 11, "Introducing Oracle JMS"
Chapter 12, "Oracle JMS Basic Operations"
Chapter 13, "Oracle JMS Point-to-Point"
Chapter 14, "Oracle JMS Publish/Subscribe"
Chapter 15, "Oracle JMS Shared Interfaces"
Chapter 16, "Oracle JMS Types Examples"
A Sample Code from Otn
http://www.oracle.com/technology/sample_code/tech/java/web_services/jmsws/NewsQueueEJB.java.html

Answer 1

I wouldn't go as far to say Oracle AQ is out-dated today. However, it is indeed a proprietary technology that did not found much main-stream adoption in the earlier years after its introduction. The advent of JMS made it somewhat more useful (or should I say intriguing, because more people are trying to tie it together with other J2EE technologies), but the Oracle's JMS wrapper classes in aqapi.jar were not feature complete for a long while, so using it outside Oracle's application server was painful, if not impossible. I do agree that the info at the dev2dev's JMS newsgroup or in this forum is highly fragmented, as neither Oracle nor BEA provides an official solution to integrate AQ with WebLogic, so people like us have to learn the technology through experimentation and in a piecemeal fashion.
3 years ago I was literally "playing around" - we had a polling mechanism set up to use triggers to write Oracle data changes into an event table, and had a Java-based daemon to scan that table and publish events as JMS messages to the WebLogic JMS server. This continues to work reliably till today, but I was looking for a solution that has few parts - I wanted to hook up my WebLogic MDB directly to AQ as a foreign JMS provider. Although I was able to get it to work (including XA), there were a few hoops I had to jump through, such as decompiling the Oracle AQjms classes to make them bind to the WebLogic JNDI tree.
One year after that Diptanshu Parui took what I did a giant step further - he extended the Oracle AQjms classes to allow them to be bound to the WebLogic JNDI tree naturally, and he figured out how to use WebLogic JMS messging bridge to re-send single-threaded AQ JMS messages to clustered JMS queues, which allow concurrent message assumption by multiple instances of MDB's. My impression is that he is using that setup in a production environment.
I am sure you are aware of it but I would like to make it clear - in order to use AQ as a foreign JMS provider to WebLogic-hosted MDB's, you don't need to update your database to Oracle 10g - Oracle 8i is good enough (although I recommend at least 9i Release 2). It is not the database engine, but rather the aqapi.jar JMS wrapper on top of AQ that matters. I do recommend that you use aqapi.jar from Oracle Application Server 10.0.3 or up for better XA support, among other things. Again, you don't have to replace WebLogic with Oracle AS - you only need a single jar file from it and put it in your WebLogic's classpath. However, I don't know what this means from a licensing point of view if you ever go to production - do you have to pay the full price of OracleAS or OC4J just to use the aqapi.jar?
In the coming days I will test the latest aqapi.jar to see how much progress Oracle has made in terms of making their J2EE products more spec-compliant :-).
Hope the above gives you a different perspective.
Eric