[series of entries regarding my trip to JIA]

JMS was, before this conference, something I had actually never heard of. I had a passing acquaintance with various messaging solutions. More like I'd just heard they existed. I wasn't even planing on attending this session, but I talked with Pearson the night before the session and he convinced me that it was worth my while to attended. He refused to try and sell me on JMS, but I drug out some information about it and was immediately interested.

Before I continue further I did want to mention that Chris double-teamed this presentation with Phil Miller. another Formicary employee and I didn't catch his name. I couldn't find it in my materials nor could I find it on the JIA site. If someone would comment with the name I would be happy to give credit where credit is due. For now I think we'll refer to him as The Enigmatic Dude, or Ted.

Phil Ted started off the presentation and gave an overview of what JMS was, a few ideas of what it might be used for and just really some general information. Once the crowd was well informed about the state of JMS and a snippet of its background. Chris came to the front to take presentation over.

The presentation was oriented as sort of a Consumer Reports for JMS. Various JMS implementations were discussed and reviewed. No real “winner” was announced, but Chris went through the caveats of the various implementations and it was clear that IBM's Websphere MQ was the loser of the reviewed products which included both open-source and proprietary products.

Pearson also provided a clear client/server code sample that ran flawlessly and showed a simple example of how easy it was to use.

I've really got an itch to use JMS now because of the presentation, the problem is I don't know what for! Formicary provides financial solutions for clients and that's about the only use I heard for JMS. I would've really like to have heard something on other uses, or what other companies were doing with the technology. This detracted a bit from the after-feeling of the presentation. I felt like I wanted to use JMS, but had no outlet in my current projects or even in future uses.

I thought this presentation really hit the mark though. I learned about JMS and got the urge to use it. Which is exactly what I expected to get out of the session.

Update: Thanks to Hani Suleiman and Ted Phil Miller himself "The Enigmatic Dude" is no longer a mystery.