Connection Factories and Connections

A client uses a connection factory object (ConnectionFactory) to create a connection. A connection object ( Connection) represents a client’s active connection to the broker. It uses the underlying connection service that is either started by default or is explicitly started by the administrator for this client.

Both allocation of communication resources and authentication of the client take place when a connection is created. It is a relatively heavyweight object, and most clients do all their messaging with a single connection. Connections support concurrent use: any number of producers and consumers can share a connection.

When you create a connection factory, you can configure the behavior of all connections derived from it by setting its properties. For Message Queue, these specify the following information:

• The name of the host on which the broker resides, the connection service desired, and the port through which the client wants to access that service.

• How automatic reconnection to the broker should be handled if the connection fails. (This feature reconnects the client to the same (or to a different broker) if a connection is lost. Data failover is not guaranteed: persistent messages and other state information can be lost when reconnecting to a different broker.)

• The ID of a client that needs the broker to track its durable subscription.

• The default name and password of the user attempting the connection. This information is used to authenticate the user and authorize operations if a password is not specified at connection time.

• Whether broker acknowledgements should be suppressed for those clients who are not concerned with reliability.

• How to manage the flow of control and payload messages between the broker and the client runtime.

• How queue browsing should be handled. (Java clients only.)

• Whether certain message header fields should be overridden.

It is possible to override connection factory properties from the command line used to start the client application. It is also possible to override properties for any given connection by setting properties for that connection.

You can use a connection object to create session objects, to set up an exception listener, or to obtain JMS version and provider information.