Spring Events vs ActiveMQ

Question

Newbee to Spring world. I have some knowledge on ActiveMQ. Recently used in one of my projects. While reading about Spring Events raised a doubt.

Spring Events: Publisher -> Listener. We do publish events and we would have created some listeners for that.

ActiveMQ: Publisher -> Listener. We do publish events and we would have created some listeners for that.

So anyone helps me to understand the use cases or difference between these two APIs.

Hydrophone

ActiveMQ is JMS, Spring events are a simple event mechanism. Both are quite different beasts with different usecases. – Annettannetta

JMS is designed to support local application events and distributed messaging. A key advantage to coding to JMS is that your application can use an embedded broker for local application eventing, and then scale to multi-server distributed events without any code change! However, if you code to Spring Events, you'll need to re-factor the app if those events need to become distributed. – Shiverick

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, Spring Events are an application level events mechanism, so that different parts inside our application can communicate/coordinate. The scope and functionality appear to be quite narrow and small respectively. You can publish events and deal with those events either synchronously (default behaviour) or asynchronously (using @EnableAsync and @Async). There is no broker. This functionality may be a perfect fit for your application if this is all it needs.

On the other hand, ActiveMQ is a full-featured message broker. Generally speaking, it runs as an independent server process (although it can be embedded in your application). It supports industry-standard protocols like AMQP, MQTT, & STOMP which have client implementations on numerous platforms and in various languages. For example, you could send STOMP messages via Websockets from a Javascript client and process those messages with an AMQP client written in .NET on Windows. It provides both a JMS & JNDI client implementation. It supports both publish-subscribe and point-to-point semantics. You can use it as an integration platform and scale it up to multi-node clusters with high-availability for the message data and thousands of remote clients using various protocols or you can embed it into your application and just use it for local events.

Leifeste