Getting the right ActiveMQ Support is not substantially different from obtaining other services or products, however there several nuances that we want you as a potential customer to be aware of. Most common problem has to do with re-packaged versions of supported flavors of ActiveMQ. Majority of organizations now have legal policy on open source, ensuring that no entity can demand money later for using open and free source code. This is commonly called “Legal Indemnification,” meaning those who provide organization with ActiveMQ support also indemnify same organizations from 3rd party claims.

The problem is that some of our competitors offer indemnified and often improved code with changes that depart from the original project or are not committed back into the project. These unintegrated patches, may be delay ability to upgrade or receive security patches released as part of the main project.

ActiveMQ Help certified downloads, contain, optional configuration files tuned for production usage. Otherwise the code is exactly the same, so you can enjoy the benefits of all the latest developments in the project without being held back by the vendor upgrading their certified and indemnified build to the latest version.

Other activities you should conduct when purchasing ActiveMQ support are:

• Speak with customers who already have and used ActiveMQ support from the vendor
• Interview several engineers and don’t be afraid to ask questions as if you were hiring them to work for you
• Present them with previous production issues you had in the past and see what their level of expertise is
• Ask how many ActiveMQ supported customers they have and what the retention is.

That’s about it and good luck.

In his new tutorial @ripienaar covers how how to build ActiveMQ networks of brokers, so check it out.

Responding to a blog entry by Stephan Schmidt (@codemonkeyism on twitter). Stephan compares the Jabber and ActiveMQ to decide which one suits better his projects needs. While both products fulfill the asynchronous messaging criteria, they have been designed and built for substantially different purposes. Below are some guidelines when to use ActiveMQ or other enterprise messaging products such as JBoss Messaging or WebSphere MQ.

Use Enterprise Messaging if project requires:

• Transactional Support
• Message Persistence and Media Recovery (Transactional Logs)
• Large Messages (4MB+)
• Competing Consumers
• Coded Character Set Conversions
• Clustering
• Blocking (Non-polling wait)
• Storing potentially millions of messages on the queue
• Message Expiration
• Multiple Qualities of Server
• Server-to-Server Channels
• Hierarchical Publish Subscribe Topic Namespace
• FIFO or Priority Queues

Use Jabber or other instant messaging protocol when you’re building a chat application. Yes. It is that simple. Here are good indicators using Jabber might be ok are:

• Messages have no or minimal business value. (They are not business transactions)
• Messages are small
• Transactional support is not necessary
• You need a simple transport(HTTP) that can work across VPN’s, Proxies and Firewalls.
• Messages have no affinity.
• Simple Message Patterns (One-to-one, One-to-many)

This paper was published by James Strachan and provides excellent summary overview of ActiveMQ usage in enterprise middleware.

Terry Palmer of cfteeps posted(via @hgz) a configuration on maintaining channels. I would also recommend increasing TCP KeepAlive interval.