(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Installing Eclipse on Windows

You can download the Eclipse IDE for Java EE developers (in our case the ZIP file eclipse-jee-indigo-SR1-win32.zip) from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/. Once downloaded, you have to unzip the eclipse folder inside the archive to the destination folder so that you have a folder structure like the one illustrated in the following screenshot:

Now a double-click on the eclipse.exe file will fire the first run of Eclipse.

Installing NetBeans on Windows

NetBeans is one of the most frequently used IDE for Java development purposes. It mimics the Eclipse plugin module's installation, so you could download the J2EE version from the URL http://netbeans.org/downloads/.But remember that this version also comes with an integrated GlassFish application server and a Tomcat server. Even in this case you only need to download the .exe file (java_ee_sdk-6u3-jdk7-windows.exe, in our case) and launch the installer. Once finished, you should be able to run the IDE by clicking on the NetBeans icon in your Windows Start menu.

Installing NetBeans on Linux

If you are using a Debian-based version of Linux like Ubuntu, installing both NetBeans and Eclipse is nothing more than typing a command from the bash shell and waiting for the installation process to finish.

As we are using Ubuntu Version 11, we will type the following command from a non-root user account to install Eclipse:

sudo apt-get install eclipse

The NetBeans installation procedure is slightly different due to the fact that the Ubuntu repositories do not have a package for a NetBeans installation.

So, for installing NetBeans you have to download a script and then run it. If you are using a non-root user account, you need to type the following commands on a terminal:

sudo wget http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/7.1.1/final/bundles/
netbeans-7.1.1-ml-javaee-linux.sh
sudo chmod +x netbeans-7.1.1-ml-javaee-linux.sh
./netbeans-7.1.1-ml-javaee-linux.sh

During the first run of the IDE, Eclipse will ask which default workspace the new projects should be stored in. Choose the one suggested, and in case you are not planning to change it, check the Use this as the default and do not ask again checkbox for not re-proposing the question, as shown in the following screenshot:

The same happens with NetBeans, but during the installation procedure.

Post installation

Both Eclipse and NetBeans have an integrated system for upgrading them to the latest version, so when you have correctly launched the first-time run, keep your IDE updated.

For Eclipse, you can access the Update window by using the menu Help | Check for updates. This will pop up the window, as shown in this screenshot:

NetBeans has the same functionality, which can be launched from the menu.

A 10,000 foot view of HornetQ

Before moving on with the coding phase, it is time to recover some concepts to allow the user and the coder to better understand how HornetQ manages messages.

HornetQ is only a set of Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs) compiled and grouped into JAR files. The software developer could easily grasp that this characteristic leads to HornetQ having no dependency on third-party libraries. It is possible to use and even start HornetQ from any Java class; this is a great advantage over other frameworks.

HornetQ deals internally only with its own set of classes, called the HornetQ core, avoiding any dependency on JMS dialect and specifications. Nevertheless, the client that connects with the HornetQ server can speak the JMS language.

So the HornetQ server also uses a JMS to core HornetQ API translator. This means that when you send a JMS message to a HornetQ server, it is received as JMS and then translated into the core API dialect to be managed internally by HornetQ. The following figure illustrates this concept:

The core messaging concepts of HornetQ are somewhat simpler than those of JMS:

• Message: This is a unit of data that can be sent/delivered from a consumer to a producer. Messages have various possibilities. But only to cite them, a message can have: durability, priority, expiry time, time, and dimension.
• Address: HornetQ maintains an association between an address (IP address of the server) and the queues available at that address. So the message is bound to the address.
• Queue: This is nothing more than a set of messages. Like messages, queues have attributes such as durability, temporary, and filtering expressions.