Running HornetQ Bridge Under JBoss 7

Here is the explanation of Bridge from the HornetQ documentation: "Some messaging systems allow isolated clusters or single nodes to be bridged together, typically over unreliable connections like a wide area network (WAN), or the internet. A bridge normally consumes from a queue on one server and forwards messages to another queue on a different server. Bridges cope with unreliable connections, automatically reconnecting when the connections becomes available again".

My goal is to setup a bridge which will forward messages between two queues residing on a different physical servers over the TCP connection. I plan to use two HornetQ services running as part of the latest JBoss (EAP 6.1.0). The "jms-bridge" example from standalone HornetQ distribution has a sample configuration (standalone-example.xml) for JBoss to setup a bridge on a single JBoss instance with HornetQ service. We will have to modify it to support two servers over the network.

In my configuration I have two systems set up, let's name them "laptop1" and "remoteHost", each of them has JBoss with HornetQ service installed. Below are the changes to the configuration from "jms-bridge" example:

1. Define new HornetQ connector and acceptor. Note that HornetQ has "netty-connector" defined for JBoss configuration, but seems it does not support "host" and "port" parameters, and rely on mandatory "socket-binding" attribute (see jboss-as-messaging_1_3.xsd from JBoss distribution for more details). That's why I had to redefine both connector and acceptor. For simplicity the acceptor has "0.0.0.0" for host to allow connections from everywhere. Also note that on second server the ports should be listed as opposite - 5457 for acceptor and 5456 for connector.

<connector name="netty-bridge">
    <factory-class>org.hornetq.core.remoting.impl.netty.NettyConnectorFactory</factory-class>
    <param key="host" value="remoteHost" />
    <param key="port" value="5457" />
</connector>

<acceptor name="netty-bridge">
    <factory-class>org.hornetq.core.remoting.impl.netty.NettyAcceptorFactory</factory-class>
    <param key="host" value="0.0.0.0" />
    <param key="port" value="5456" />
</acceptor>

2. Disable the HornetQ security, also for simplicity reasons. The proper approach will be to specify "user" and "password" as parameters for connector above.

<hornetq-server>
        <security-enabled>false</security-enabled>
        ...

3. Define two queues: "source" and "target". If desired, for the purposes of this example would be enough to have only one "source" query on local server and one "target" on remote. 

<jms-queue name="sourceQueue">
    <entry name="queue/sourceQueue"/>
    <entry name="java:jboss/exported/jms/queues/sourceQueue"/>
</jms-queue>
<jms-queue name="targetQueue">
    <entry name="java:/queue/targetQueue"/>
     <entry name="java:jboss/exported/jms/queues/targetQueue"/>
</jms-queue>

4. Define a new connection factory to use in bridge.

<connection-factory name="RemoteConnectionFactoryBridge">
    <connectors>
       <connector-ref connector-name="netty-bridge"/>
    </connectors>
    <entries>
       <entry name="RemoteConnectionFactoryBridge"/>
       <entry name="java:jboss/exported/jms/RemoteConnectionFactoryBridge"/>
    </entries>
</connection-factory>

5. Modify bridge definition added after "hornetq-system" tag in settings.xml.

<jms-bridge name="myBridge">
    <source>
        <connection-factory name="ConnectionFactory" />
        <destination name="queue/sourceQueue" />
    </source>
    <target>
        <connection-factory name="RemoteConnectionFactoryBridge" />
        <destination name="queue/targetQueue" />
    </target>
    <quality-of-service>AT_MOST_ONCE</quality-of-service>
    <failure-retry-interval>1000</failure-retry-interval>
    <max-retries>7890</max-retries>
    <max-batch-size>1</max-batch-size>
    <max-batch-time>1000</max-batch-time>
</jms-bridge>

After starting up both JBoss servers, watch for log message indicating that the bridge is started and connection between two HornetQ instances has been established:

18:54:55,621 INFO [org.hornetq.core.server] (MSC service thread 1-1) HQ221024: Started Netty Acceptor version 3.6.2.Final-c0d783c 0.0.0.0:5456 for CORE protocol
...
18:54:57,953 DEBUG [org.hornetq.core.client] (ServerService Thread Pool -- 61) Remote destination: rokan01-VM3762.ca.com/10.130.248.122:5457
...
18:54:58,723 INFO [org.jboss.messaging] (ServerService Thread Pool -- 61) JBAS011610: Started JMS Bridge myBridge

To test the configuration, send a sample message to a "sourceQueue" using for example Teiid messageSender from one of my previous articles:

call Times.messageSender('queue/sourceQueue', 'My Message1'); 

Now login to JBoss Management Console on your remoteHost (http://remoteHost:9990/console/App.html#jms-metrics) and make sure the messages are gets delivered over the bridge to remote host "targetQueue":

There might be a moment when you have only a "connector" side of the bridge up and running. The bridge will automatically reattempt to instantiate the connection every second (configurable by "failure-retry-interval" setting in bridge definition above), until the "acceptor" side of the bridge will be available.