Apache ActiveMQ 5.4.0 is out. Beside our usual dedication to making it bullet-proof by adding a lot of test cases and resolving issues reported by our vibrant community, this release contains a lot of new features (some of which has already been covered here). In this post I’ll try to sum up the new features that we included in this release. As the development pace was very rapid, some of them haven’t been documented yet, but that’ll change soon too. So let’s start:
- Message Priority - Queues and Durable Topic subscribers can dispatch messages based on the message priority. For durable messages you can use priorities with KahaDB and JDBC persistence.
- Scheduled Delivery of Messages (http://activemq.apache.org/delay-and-schedule-message-delivery.html) - Now you can delay or schedule delivery of messages from your destinations and thus create distributed scheduler.
- HTML 5 Web Sockets (http://activemq.apache.org/websockets.html) - Want to send/receive messages from your browser using web sockets? No problem, just setup the websocket transport, take client library and use Stomp directly from JavaScript.
- Better OSGi support (http://activemq.apache.org/osgi-integration.html) - configure and use ActiveMQ broker and web console easily in OSGi environment, such as Apache Karaf.
- Better Unix support (http://activemq.apache.org/unix-shell-script.html) - new shell scripts that will enable you to easier control your brokers from the command line
- Easy way to configure Web Console (http://activemq.apache.org/web-console.html#WebConsole-SecuringWebConsole) - now you can easily secure web console, by changing only one line in the configuration file
- Selectors for Ajax and REST consumers (http://activemq.apache.org/rest.html#REST-Consumingwithselectors) - want to use selectors to consume from destinations using REST. This is now achievable with ActiveMQ 5.4.0.
- New security options:
- JaasDualAuthentcationPlugin - that helps you use certificate authentication for SSL connections and username/password ones for plain TCP ones.
- Anonymous users (http://activemq.apache.org/security.html#Security-Anonymousaccess) - allow access to anonymous users to the secured broker
- Ajax Adapters - use Ajax API with popular client libraries, such as JQuery, Dojo or Prototype
These are definitely interesting times for open source messaging and be sure to expect a lot more from ActiveMQ team (such as new Apollo architecture). Also, don’t miss Rob Davies talking on Deploying ActiveMQ in the Enterprise on August 19th.