Payara Micro is a lightweight middleware platform for containerized Jakarta EE application deployments, but it still provides a lot of APIs and functionality for developers. On top of all Jakarta EE Web Profile APIs, Payara Micro also supports a additional Jakarta EE APIs, and it also provides the same MicroProfile, Payara, and JCache APIs as our complete application platform, Payara Server. In this article, we’ll show you how to make use of Jakarta Messaging (JMS) in Payara Micro to send and receive messages to and from a JMS broker.

Payara Server comes bundled with OpenMQ, which implements the Java Message Service (JMS) standard.

For simple messaging scenarios, it is convenient to use embedded OpenMQ broker, which is available by default. However, this embedded OpenMQ is running inside the JVM instance of Payara Server. This implies that whenever one of them needs to be restarted, the other one gets restarted too.

Many of our customers often use a different JMS provider in their organisation than the embedded JMS broker shipped with Payara Server, for example IBM MQSeries or ActiveMQ. Doing this often caused problems for our customers because the unconfigured OpenMQ broker could cause start up problems or delays, as well as delays in XA recovery. From Payara Server 4.1.154 onwards we've added functionality to disable the embedded OpenMQ broker. In this blog we'll talk through how to disable OpenMQ across the whole domain.