Broker Services

Figure 1–6 shows the different elements of the Message Queue service. Chapter 2, Client Programming Model described the programming model and how clients use the Java and C APIs to interact with the Message Queue client runtime, the part of the message service that is directly accessed by client applications. This chapter focuses on the broker services, the part of the message service that is accessed through administration tools.

The broker is the centerpiece of the Message Queue service shown in Figure 1–6. The broker provides the set of services that enable secure, reliable messaging:

• Connection services that manage the physical connections between a broker and its clients that provide transport for incoming and outgoing messages. See Connection Services.

• Message delivery services that route and deliver JMS messages as well as control messages used by the message service to support reliable delivery. See Message Delivery Services.

• Persistence services that manage the writing of data to persistent storage and its retrieval from persistent storage. See Persistence Services.

• Security services that authenticate users connecting to the broker and authorize their actions. See Security Services

• Clustering services that support the grouping of brokers into a cluster to achieve scalability and availability. See Chapter 4, Broker Clusters.

• Monitoring services that generate metrics and diagnostic information and write this information to a specified output channel. See Monitoring Services.

The sections that follow describe each of the broker services. These services are configured by setting broker configuration properties. Broker properties are specified in different configuration files and can also be set using options of the broker startup command. Chapter 4, Configuring a Broker, in Sun Java System Message Queue 4.3 Administration Guide describes the broker configuration files and explains the order of precedence by which property values in one configuration file can be used to override values set in a different file. Properties set with the startup command override all other settings.

Connection Services

You use connection-related properties to configure and manage the physical connections between a broker and its clients. As shown in Figure 1–6 both application clients and administration clients can connect to the broker. The JMS specification does not dictate that providers implement any specific wire protocols. Message Queue connection services, used by application clients and administration clients to connect to the broker, are currently layered on top of TCP, TLS, HTTP, or HTTPS protocols. TLS (Transport Layer Security) is a successor to and compatible with SSL (Secure Socket Layer).

There are two general types of connection services:

• NORMAL: Services that provide JMS support and allow clients to connect to the broker (jms, ssljms, http, or https) and are layered on top of TCP, TLS, HTTP, or HTTPS protocols, respectively. (Services layered on top of HTTP allow messages to pass through firewalls.)

• ADMIN: Services that allow administrators to connect to the broker ( admin, ssladmin) and are layered on top of TCP or TLS protocols.

Connection services are available through dedicated ports that can be dynamically assigned by the broker’s Port Mapper (see Port Mapper Service) or statically assigned by the administrator. By default, when you start the broker, the jms and admin services are up and running. Additionally, you can configure a broker to run any or all of the connection services.

Each connection service is multi-threaded, supporting multiple connections, and each service supports specific authentication and authorization (access control) features. See Security Services for more information.

Should a connection fail, the Message Queue service can automatically retry connecting the client to the same broker or to a different broker if this feature is enabled. For more information, see the description of the automatic reconnect feature in Appendix B, Message Queue Features

The connections provided by Message Queue connection services can be configured to specify which brokers to connect to, how to handle reconnection, message flow control, and so on. For additional information about how connections can be configured, see Connection Factories and Connections.

Connection configuration can be performed by both administrators and in client application code:

• An administrator creates connection factory administered objects that encapsulate connection behaviors. In addition, an administrator can use broker properties to activate non-default connection services, to assign static ports if required, to configure threading, and to specify a host to connect to if multiple network interfaces are used. An administrator can also specify a ping interval to test whether the client is accessible; this is useful in managing resources.

• Client code can instantiate configuration factory objects and set their attributes to achieve desired connection behaviors. These attributes specify non-default connection services, hosts, ports, a list of brokers to connect to in case reconnection is required, and reconnection behavior. The client can also specify a ping interval to test for failed connections.

A client can connect to the Message Queue service through a firewall. This can be done either by having the firewall administrator open a specific port and then connecting to that (static) port or by using the HTTP or HTTPS service as summarized in Appendix B, Message Queue Features.

Port Mapper Service

Connection services are dynamically assigned a port by a common Port Mapper service that resides at a the broker’s main port, 7676. When the Message Queue client runtime sets up a connection with the broker, it first contacts the Port Mapper, requesting a port number for the connection service it has chosen.

You can override the Port Mapper by assigning a static port number for the jms, ssljms, admin and ssladmin connection services when configuring these services. However, static ports are generally used only in special situations, such as in making connections through a firewall, and are not generally recommended.

Thread Pool Management

Each connection service is multithreaded, supporting multiple connections. The threads needed for these connections are maintained by the broker in a pool. How they are allocated depends on the values you specify for the minimum and maximum thread values, and on the threading model you choose.

You can set broker properties to specify a minimum number and maximum number of threads. As threads are needed by connections, they are added to the thread pool for the service supporting that connection. The minimum specifies the number of threads available to be allocated. When the available threads exceeds this minimum threshold, the system will shut down threads as they become free until the minimum is reached again, thereby saving on memory resources. Under heavy loads, the number of threads might increase until the pool’s maximum number is reached; at this point, new connections are rejected until a thread becomes available.

The threading model you choose specifies whether threads are dedicated to a single connection or shared by multiple connections:

• In the dedicated model, each connection to the broker requires two threads: one for incoming messages and one for outgoing messages. This limits the number of possible connections but provides high performance.

• In the shared model, connections are processed by a shared thread when sending or receiving messages. Because each connection does not require dedicated threads, this model increases the number of possible connections, but adds some overhead for thread management and thereby impacts performance.

Message Delivery Services

Once clients are connected to the broker, the routing and delivery of messages can proceed. In this phase, the broker is responsible for creating and managing different types of physical destinations, for ensuring a smooth flow of messages, and for using resources efficiently. The broker properties related to routing and delivery are used by the broker to manage these tasks in a way that suits your application’s needs.

Physical Destinations

A physical destination on the broker is a memory location where messages are stored before being delivered to a message consumer. There are four kinds of physical destinations:

• Admin-created destinations are created by an administrator using Message Queue administration tools. Admin-created destinations correspond to destination administered objects created by an administrator and accessed by client applications by using a JNDI lookup. Admin-created destinations can also correspond to destination objects created programmatically by a client application. You use Message Queue administration tools to set or update properties for each admin-created destination.

• Auto-created destinations are automatically created by the broker whenever a message consumer or producer attempts to access a nonexistent destination. These are typically used during development. You can set a broker property to disallow the creation of such destinations. You set broker properties to configure all auto-create destinations on a particular broker.

  An auto-created destination is automatically destroyed by the broker when it is no longer being used: that is, when it has no consumer clients and no longer contains any messages. If a broker restarts, it only recreates this kind of destination if it contains persistent messages.

• Temporary destinations are explicitly created and destroyed programmatically by client applications that need a destination at which to receive replies to messages. As their name implies, these destinations are temporary. They are maintained by the broker only for the duration of the connection in which they are created.

  Temporary destinations are only stored persistently only if the consumer of the destination is set to automatically reconnect in the event of failure. Otherwise, they are not recreated when a broker is restarted. Nevertheless, temporary destinations are visible to administration tools.

• The dead message queue is a specialized destination, created automatically at broker startup and used to store dead messages for diagnostic purposes. You can set properties for the dead message queue using the imqcmd utility.

Managing Destinations

Managing a destination involves one or more of the following tasks:

• Creating, pausing, resuming, or destroying a destination

• Listing all destinations on a broker

• Displaying information about the state and properties of a destination

• Displaying metrics information for a destination

• Compacting disk space used to persist messages for a destination

• Updating a physical destination’s properties

Management tasks vary with the kind of destination being managed: admin-created, auto-created, temporary, or dead message queue. For example, temporary destinations do not need to be explicitly destroyed; auto created properties are configured using broker configuration properties which apply to all auto-created destinations on that broker.

Configuring Physical Destinations

For optimal performance, you can set properties when creating or updating physical destinations. Properties that can be set include the following:

• The type and name of the destination.

• Individual and aggregate limits for destinations (the maximum number of messages, the maximum number of total bytes, the maximum number of bytes per message, the maximum number of producers).

• What the broker should do when individual or aggregate limits are exceeded.

• The maximum number of messages to be delivered in a single batch.

• Whether deleted messages for a destination should be sent to the dead message queue.

• In the case of a broker cluster, whether a destination should be propagated to other brokers in the cluster.

For a queue destination you can also configure the maximum number of active and back up consumers and you can specify (for broker clusters) whether delivery to a local queue is preferred.

You can also configure the limits and behavior of the dead message queue. Note, however, that default properties for this queue differ from those of a standard queue.

Managing Memory

Destinations can consume significant resources, depending on the number and size of messages they handle and on the number and durability of the consumers that register; therefore, they need to be managed closely to guarantee good messaging service performance and reliability.

You can set properties to prevent a broker from being overwhelmed by incoming messages and to prevent the broker from running out of memory. The broker uses three levels of memory protection to keep the message service operating as resources become scarce: destination limits, system-wide limits, and system memory thresholds. Ideally, if destination limits and system-wide limits are set appropriately, critical system-memory thresholds should never be breached.

Destination Message Limits

You can set destination properties to manage memory and message flow for each destination. For example, you can specify the maximum number of producers allowed for a destination, the maximum number (or size) of messages allowed in a destination, and the maximum size of any single message.

You can also specify how the broker should respond when any such limits are reached: to slow producers, to throw out the oldest messages, to throw out the lowest-priority messages, or to reject the newest messages.

System-Wide Message Limits

You can also use properties to set limits that apply to all destinations on a broker: you can specify the total number of messages and the memory consumed by all messages. If any of the system-wide message limits are reached, the broker rejects new messages.

System Memory Thresholds

Finally, you can use properties to set thresholds at which the broker takes increasingly serious action to prevent memory overload. The action taken depends on the state of memory resources: green (plenty of memory is available), yellow (broker memory is running low), orange (broker is low on memory), red (broker is out of memory). As the broker’s memory state progresses from green to red, the broker takes increasingly serious actions:

• It throws out in-memory copies of persistent messages in the data store.

• It throttles back producers of non-persistent messages, eventually stopping the flow of messages into the broker. Persistent message flow is automatically limited by the requirement that each message be acknowledged by the broker.

Persistence Services

For a broker to recover in case of failure, it needs to recreate the state of its message delivery operations. To be able to do this, it must save state information to a data store. When the broker restarts, it uses the saved data to recreate destinations and durable subscriptions, to recover persistent messages, to roll back open transactions, and to recreate its routing table for undelivered messages. It can then resume message delivery.

The Message Queue service supports both file-based and JDBC compliant persistence modules (see Figure 3–1). File-based persistence is the default.

Figure 3–1 Persistence Support

File-Based Persistence

File-based persistence is a mechanism that uses individual files to store persistent data. If you use file-based persistence you can set broker properties to do the following:

• Compact the data store to alleviate fragmentation as messages are added and removed.

• Synchronize the in-memory state with the physical storage device on every write. This helps eliminate data loss due to system crashes.

• Manage the allocation of messages to data store files and manage the resources needed for file management and storage.

File-based persistence is generally faster that JDBC-based persistence; however, some users prefer the redundancy and administrative control provided by a JDBC-compliant store.

JDBC-Based Persistence

JDBC-Based persistence uses a Java Database Connectivity (JDBC^TM) interface to connect the broker to a JDBC-compliant data store. To have the broker access a data store through a JDBC driver you must do the following:

• Set JDBC-related broker configuration properties. You use these to specify the JDBC driver used, to authenticate the broker as a JDBC user, to create needed tables, and so on.

• Use the imqdbmgr utility to create a data store with the proper schema.

Complete procedures for completing these tasks and related configuration properties are detailed in the Chapter 4, Configuring a Broker, in Sun Java System Message Queue 4.3 Administration Guide.

Security Services

The Message Queue service supports authentication and authorization (access control) for each broker instance, and also supports encryption:

• Authentication ensures that only verified users can establish a connection to the broker.

• Authorization specifies which users or groups have the right to access resources and to perform specific operations.

• Encryption protects messages from being tampered with during delivery over a connection.

Authentication and authorization depend upon a repository that contains information about the users of the messaging system—their names, passwords, and group memberships. In addition, to authorize specific operations for a user or group, the broker must check an access control properties file that specifies which operations a user or group can perform. You are responsible for setting up the information the broker needs to authenticate users and authorize their actions.

Figure 3–2 shows the components needed by the broker to provide authentication and authorization.

Figure 3–2 Security Manager Support

As Figure 3–2 shows, you can store user data in a flat file user repository that is provided with the Message Queue service, you can access an existing LDAP repository, or you can plug in a Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) service. You set a broker property to indicate your choice.

• If you choose a flat-file repository, you must use the imqusermgr utility to manage the repository. This option is easy to use and built-in.

• If you want to use an existing LDAP server, you use the tools provided by the LDAP vendor to populate and manage the user repository. You must also set properties in the broker instance configuration file to enable the broker to query the LDAP server for information about users and groups.

  The LDAP option is better if scalability is important or if you need the repository to be shared by different brokers. This might be the case if you are using broker clusters.

• If you want to plug-in an existing JAAS authentication service, you need to set the corresponding properties in the broker instance configuration file.

Authentication and Authorization

When a client requests a connection, the client must supply a user name and password. The broker compares the specified name and password to those stored in the user repository. On transmitting the password from client to broker, the passwords are encoded using either base 64 encoding or message digest (MD5) hashing. MD5 is used for a flat file repository; base 64 is required for LDAP repositories. If using LDAP you may want to use the secure TLS protocol. You can set broker properties to configure the type of encoding used by each connection service separately or to set the encoding on a broker-wide basis.

When a user attempts to perform an operation, the broker checks the user’s name and group membership (from the user repository) against those specified for access to that operation (in the access control properties file). The access control properties file specifies permissions to users or groups for the following operations:

• Connecting to a broker

• Accessing destinations: creating a consumer, a producer, or a queue browser for any given destination or all destinations

• Auto-creating destinations

You set broker properties to specify the following information:

• Whether access control is enabled

• The name of the access control file

• How passwords should be encoded

• How long the system should wait for a client to respond to an authentication request from the broker

• Information required by secure connections

JAAS-Based Authentication

In addition to the file-based and LDAP-based built-in authentication mechanisms, Message Queue also supports the Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS), which allows you to plug a variety of services into the broker to authenticate Message Queue clients.

JAAS defines an abstraction layer between an application and an authentication mechanism, allowing the desired mechanism to be plugged in with no disruption or change to application code. For the Message Queue service, the abstraction layer lies between the broker and the authentication provider. By setting a few broker properties, it is possible to plug in any JAAS-compliant authentication service and to upgrade or change this service with no disruption or change to broker code.

The service to be plugged in consists of a LoginModule and of logic that performs the authentication. A JAAS configuration file contains the location of the LoginModule. When the broker starts up it locates this file and uses information in the file to determine which LoginModules it will use to perform the authentication. The fact that the broker plugs in an authentication service is transparent to the client; the client continues to pass authentication information to the broker as before and gains access to broker services if the identifying information (user name, password) is authenticated by the plugged in service.

For complete information about JAAS-based authentication, see Using JAAS-Based Authentication in Sun Java System Message Queue 4.3 Administration Guide.

Encryption

To encrypt messages sent between clients and broker, you need to use a connection service based on the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) standard. SSL provides security at a connection level by establishing an encrypted connection between an SSL-enabled broker and an SSL-enabled client.

You can set broker properties to specify the security properties of the SSL keystore to be used and the name and location of a password file.

For more information, see Message Encryption in Sun Java System Message Queue 4.3 Administration Guide

Monitoring Services

The broker includes components for monitoring and diagnosing application and broker performance. These include the components shown in the following figure:

• Components that generate data: a metrics generator and broker code that logs events.

• A logger component that writes out information to a number of output channels.

• A metrics message producer that sends JMS messages containing metrics information to topic destinations for consumption by JMS monitoring clients.

• A comprehensive set of Java Management Extensions (JMX) MBeans that expose broker resources using the JMX API

• Support for the Java ES Monitoring Framework

The following subsections describe these components.

Figure 3–3 Monitoring Service Support

Metrics Generator

The metrics generator provides information about broker activity, such as message flow in and out of the broker, the number of messages in broker memory and the memory they consume, the number of open connections, and the number of threads being used.

You can set broker properties to turn the generation of metric data on and off, and to specify how frequently metrics reports are generated.

Logger

The Message Queue logger takes information generated by broker code and the metrics generator and writes that information to standard output (the console), to a log file, and, on Solaris^TM platforms, to the syslog daemon process in case of errors.

You can set broker properties to specify the type of information gathered by the logger as well as the type written to each of the output channels. In the case of a log file, you can also specify the point at which the log file is closed and output is rolled over to a new file. Once the log file reaches a specified size or age, it is saved and a new log file created.

For details about how to configure the logger and how to use it to obtain performance information, see Configuring and Using Broker Logging in Sun Java System Message Queue 4.3 Administration Guide.

Metrics Message Producer

The metrics message producer shown in Figure 3–3 receives information from the metrics generator at regular intervals and writes the information into messages, which it then sends to one of a number of metric topic destinations, depending on the type of metric information contained in the message.

Message Queue clients subscribed to these metric topic destinations can consume the messages and process the metric data contained in the messages. This allows developers to create custom monitoring tools to support messaging applications. For details of the metric quantities reported in each type of metrics message, see Chapter 20, Metrics Information Reference, in Sun Java System Message Queue 4.3 Administration Guide. For information about how to configure the production of metrics messages, see Chapter 4, Using the Metrics Monitoring API, in Sun Java System Message Queue 4.3 Developer’s Guide for Java Clients and Using the Message-Based Monitoring API in Sun Java System Message Queue 4.3 Administration Guide.

JMX MBeans

The broker implements a comprehensive set of Java Management Extensions (JMX) MBeans that represent the broker's manageable resources. Using the JMX API, you can access these MBeans to perform broker configuration and monitoring operations programmatically from within a Java application.

In this way, the MBeans provide a Java application access to data values representing static or dynamic properties of a broker, connection, destination, or other resource. The application can also receive notifications of state changes or other significant events affecting the resource.

For more information see JMX-Based Administration.

Java ES Monitoring Framework Support

Message Queue supports the Sun Java Enterprise System (Java ES) Monitoring Framework, which allows Java Enterprise System components to be monitored using a common graphical interface. This interface is implemented by a web-based console called the Sun Java System Monitoring Console. If you are running Message Queue along with other Java ES components, you might find it more convenient to use a single interface to manage all these components.

The Java ES monitoring framework defines a common data model (CMM) to be used by all Java ES component products. This model enables a centralized and uniform view of all Java ES components. Message Queue exposes the following objects to the Java ES monitoring framework:

• the installed product

• the broker instance name

• the broker port mapper

• each connection service

• each physical destination

• the persistent store

• the user repository

Each one of these objects is mapped to a CMM object whose attributes can be monitored using the Java ES monitoring console. At runtime, administrators can use the console to view performance statistics, create rules to monitor automatically, and acknowledge alarms. For detailed information about the mapping of Message Queue objects to CMM objects, see the Sun Java Enterprise System Monitoring Guide.

Using the Java ES Monitoring Framework will not impact broker performance because all the work of gathering metrics is done by the monitoring framework, which pulls data from the broker's existing monitoring data infrastructure.