Configuring and Managing the WebLogic Messaging Bridge

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Designing a Messaging Bridge

Use the following information to help you design and configure a WebLogic Messaging Bridge:

 


When to use a Messaging Bridge

The following sections provide information on when to use a messaging bridge:

Store and Forward Messaging

A messaging bridge provides high availability for remote destinations. Store and forward messaging enables a local client to produce to a local destination and have those messages automatically forwarded to the remote destination when it is available. This allows a local client to continue to produce messages when a remote destination is not available. See Messaging Persistence.

Use the WebLogic Messaging Bridge to provide an administrative solution to store and forward messages between:

Replicating a Topic

A messaging bridge can be used to replicate a topic, similar to using the distributed topics feature available in WebLogic Server releases 7.0 and higher, consequently improving scalability and high availability in some scenarios. Topic replication is accomplished by configuring the bridge to subscribe to one topic and forward the topic's messages to another topic, in essence creating two topics with the same message stream. See “Create messaging bridge instances” in Administration Console Online Help.

 


When to Avoid using a Messaging Bridge

The following sections provide information on when to avoid using messaging bridge:

The following table summarizes information on when to use WebLogic Messaging Bridge or other forwarding technologies:

Table 3-1 Comparing Message Forwarding Technologies
Feature
Messaging Bridge
Message Driven Beans
WebLogic Store-and-Forward
Implementation mechanism
Administrative
Programmatic
Administrative
Support for foreign and legacy providers
Yes
No
No, use to forward messages between WebLogic 9.0 and higher domains.

 


Selecting a Quality-of-Service (QOS) Level

The WebLogic Messaging Bridge supports three different QOS levels:

In some instances, the target destination may not be able to provide the quality of service configured for the bridge. In these cases, configure the bridge instance to allow the quality of service to be degraded by setting the QOSDegradationAllowed flag. See “Create messaging bridge instances” in Administration Console Online Help.

 


Messaging Persistence

Store-and-forward messaging enables a local JMS client to produce messages to a local destination and have those messages automatically forwarded to a remote destination when it is available. The bridge will forward these messages to the target destination when it is restarted. A messaging bridge will store-and-forward messages to a target destination under the following conditions:

 


Message Ordering

If an application message is in a transaction, saving the message in the persistent store must be part of the user transaction to preserve exactly-once semantics. In particular, the message is removed from the persistent store as part of the transaction rollback if the application decides to rollback the transaction. However, forwarding is not part of the application transaction. The sending agent does not forward a transactional message until the transaction commits. Within a transaction, message ordering is preserved based on when the messages are sent.

To ensure message ordering, configure a message unit-of-order. See “Using Message Unit-of-Order” in Programming WebLogic JMS.

 


Setting the Number of Connection Factories

You may need to modify the capacity of the connection factory associated with each resource adaptor by adjusting the initial-capacity and max-capacity attributes the weblogic-ra.xml descriptor file. In general, the value of the max-capacity attribute should be at least two times the number of bridge instances. For example:

The default configuration sets the value of the max-capacity attribute to 20. This setting is adequate for environments that have up to ten message bridge instances targeted. If you increase the number of bridge instances to 15, increase the max-capacity attribute to 30.

Use the following steps to modify the weblogic-ra.xml descriptor file:

  1. Using the editor of your choice, update the attribute with the desired value. See Listing 3-1.
  2. Deploy the updated adapter.
  3. Stop and restart any bridge instance that requires the new values.
  4. Listing 3-1 Example weblogic-ra.xml Descriptor File
    <weblogic-connection-factory-dd>
         <connection-factory-name>WLSJMSConnectionFactoryLocal</connection-factory-name>
         <jndi-name>eis/jms/WLSConnectionFactoryJNDILocal</jndi-name>
              <pool-params>
                   <initial-capacity>0</initial-capacity>
                   <max-capacity>20</max-capacity>
              </pool-params>
    </weblogic-connection-factory-dd>

 


Preserving Message Properties

Set PreserveMsgProperty to preserve message properties in a message header when a message is forwarded by a bridge instance. In previous releases, message properties are inherited from the Default Delivery Mode attribute on the connection factory used when a message is forwarded to its target destination. If the Default Delivery Mode is persistent, a non-persistent message is forwarded as a persistent message resulting in a significant performance loss.

When PreserveMsgProperty is enabled, an incoming non-persistent message is forwarded by the bridge to the target destination as a non-persistent message and an incoming persistent message is forwarded to the target destination as a persistent message. See “Configure messaging bridge instances” in Administration Console Online Help.

The behavior of a messaging bridge instance is determined according to the following guidelines:

 


Using the JMSXUserID Property with a Messaging Bridge

The messaging bridge does not disclose a message’s JMSXUserID across messaging bridge boundaries. A JMSXUserID is a system generated property that identifies the user sending the message, see the JMS Specification.

 


Using Distributed Destinations as Source and Target Destinations

A messaging bridge can send to and receive from distributed destinations. BEA Systems recommends the following configurations:

 


Tuning a WebLogic Messaging Bridge

The main objective when tuning a messaging bridge is to improve overall messaging performance. Raw speed, though important, is only one of several performance-related factors. Other performance factors include reliability, scalability, manageability, monitoring, user transactions, message-driven bean support, and integration with an application server. See “ Tuning WebLogic Message Bridge” in WebLogic Server Performance and Tuning:


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