Listen to UDP socket using Apache ActiveMQ?

Question

I have an application, foo which takes in data, does stuff to it, and then publishes the new treated data over AMQ for another downstream application to grab. Until this point, foo has always gotten its data by connecting to another AMQ server which another script is publishing packetized data to (a lot of handwaving here, but the specifics don't really matter).

Recently a change has been made, and foo needs to be able to grab its data from a UDP socket. Is AMQ able to connect to this socket and receive/listen to the data being transmitted over it? From my understanding, AMQ uses TCP to establish connection to the client, and some initial research points me to this UDP Transport documentation from Apache , but not much else.

Alternatively, I could develop a rough UDP socket listener in Python, and then publish those messages to AMQ for foo to grab, but it would be optimal to have it all included in foo itself.

Not necessarily looking for an exhaustive solution here; quick and dirty would be enough to get me started.

Thanks!

Answer 1

ActiveMQ itself is a broker and therefore doesn't connect to sockets and listen for messages. It is the job of a client to connect to the broker and send and/or receive messages.

The UDP transport documentation is just theoretical as far as I know. It is technically possible to use UDP as the base of a traditional messaging protcol, but I've never actually seen it done since UDP is unreliable. The documentation even says, "Note that by default UDP is not reliable; datagrams can be lost so you should add a reliability layer to ensure the JMS contract can be implemented on a non-reliable transport." Adding a "reliability layer" is impractical when TCP can simply be used instead. All of the protocols which ActiveMQ supports (ie AMQP, STOMP, MQTT, OpenWire) fundamentally require a reliable.network transport.

I definitely think you'll need some kind of intermediary process to read the data from the UDP socket and push it to the broker.