Yes, that’s right. We’re extending support to other queueing systems beyond MSMQ. First pick was ActiveMQ. More to come in the future.
You’ll be able to use more or less all features available to MSMQ users – copy/paste messages, save/load to files, create test messages, bulk sending for performance tests, etc. Standard message views like JSON, XML, Text, Hex will continue to work as well. We’ll also cover ActiveMQ specific features. Message properties and headers will be available for filtering and editing, allowing you to quickly find relevant message and change it if needed.
ActiveMQ Topics
One of biggest differences between ActiveMQ and MSMQ are Topics. Topics are a way to achieve publish/subscribe messaging pattern. Unlike regular queues, topic can have multiple subscribers and each of them receives all messages sent to topic. On the other hand, these messages are not stored like messages sent to a regular queue. They are just passed to currently active subscribers *. So when you subscribe to a topic you only get messages which are published from that moment on.
* What I wrote here is not actually true, but a simplification to help distinguish between regular queue and topic. You can configure topic to keep messages for some time so that if you drop subscription and resubscribe you get messages which came during that period.
Anyway, apart from functionality we already had working for MSMQ, QueueExplorer for ActiveMQ will also allow you to subscribe to topic and see messages as they come in real time.
Sing up to try ActiveMQ support
ActiveMQ support is not yet ready for public yet, but if you want to be the first to know when it’s available sign up here.