OracleAS JMS, Hermes and MBeans

I was working with OracleAS JMS over the last few days (actually with the Oracle ESB which uses OracleAS JMS under the covers) and wanted to see the message queue contents as well as replay some messages. Looking around I noticed this recent addition to the Hermes JMS client - instructions for setting up Hermes to work with OracleAS and an accompanying viewlet.

The only problem was that I was not using stand-alone OC4J (the 70M download) but the managed version of OracleAS so the configuration was slightly different. First thing that changes is you have to add the optic.jar library to the list of libraries so that Hermes can understand the managed OracleAS process management environment (OPMN). The addition to the libraries is shown below:


and then when pointing Hermes at my instance, instead of using the ORMI port of stand-alone OC4J (ormi://localhost:23791) as shown on the Hermes site, I had to point at the process management port (typically 6003) so that the cluster of OC4J instances I have running on my laptop could be discovered as shown below (default is the parent application in any particular container):


Once that was done, Hermes operated just like against a stand-alone environment and let me poke around in my queues and topics, replay messages etc:



Pretty cool.

Not total satisfied with that, I also wanted to muck around in the OracleAS Control management console and noticed a quick and dirty way to look at queue/topic content in the MBean browser - kind of going behind the scenes of the management console which is built on top of these MBeans.

Below is a picture sequence of browsing through the MBean browser to a particular queue, entering the bare minimum parameters to query the queue and the resulting output:



Obviously this is the technical backdoor as the majority of the ASControl management console is more focussed around task based interactions of configuring the server (e.g. like JMS queues and topics). However, if you happen to need this level of detail or are into very specific administrative scripting using a language like Groovy that is JMX aware, knowing that OracleAS is fully managable via these MBeans gives you infinite configurability over your application server environment.

For those not so inclined and more focussed on task based configuration - the goal of ASControl - JMS configurability is available from the console like the example shown below for creating a queues. Just choose your poison.


Like with the pluggability of Hermes into OracleAS, a topic for another day, to extend the MBean discussion, will be plugging the JDK JConsole and open source kits like MC4J into this environment.