The Channel Adapters and Gateways featured above are all intended for applications that are integrating with other external systems. The inbound options assume that some other system is sending JMS Messages to the JMS Destination and the outbound options assume that some other system is receiving from the Destination. The other system may or may not be a Spring Integration application. Of course, when sending the Spring Integration Message instance as the body of the JMS Message itself (with the 'extract-payload' value set to false), it is assumed that the other system is based on Spring Integration. However, that is by no means a requirement. That flexibility is one of the benefits of using a Message-based integration option with the abstraction of "channels" or Destinations in the case of JMS.

There are cases where both the producer and consumer for a given JMS Destination are intended to be part of the same application, running within the same process. This could be accomplished by using a pair of inbound and outbound Channel Adapters. The problem with that approach is that two adapters are required even though conceptually the goal is to have a single Message Channel. A better option is supported as of Spring Integration version 2.0. Now it is possible to define a single "channel" when using the JMS namespace.

 <jms:channel id="jmsChannel" queue="exampleQueue"/>

The channel in the above example will behave much like a normal <channel/> element from the main Spring Integration namespace. It can be referenced by both "input-channel" and "output-channel" attributes of any endpoint. The difference is that this channel is backed by a JMS Queue instance named "exampleQueue". This means that asynchronous messaging is possible between the producing and consuming endpoints, but unlike the simpler asynchronous Message Channels created by adding a <queue/> sub-element within a non-JMS <channel/> element, the Messages are not just stored in an in-memory queue. Instead those Messages are passed within a JMS Message body, and the full power of the underlying JMS provider is then available for that channel. Probably the most common rationale for using this alternative would be to take advantage of the persistence made available by the store and forward approach of JMS messaging. If configured properly, the JMS-backed Message Channel also supports transactions. In other words, a producer would not actually write to a transactional JMS-backed channel if its send operation is part of a transaction that rolls back. Likewise, a consumer would not physically remove a JMS Message from the channel if the reception of that Message is part of a transaction that rolls back. Note that the producer and consumer transactions are separate in such a scenario. This is significantly different than the propagation of a transactional context across the simple, synchronous <channel/> element that has no <queue/> sub-element.

Since the example above is referencing a JMS Queue instance, it will act as a point-to-point channel. If on the other hand, publish/subscribe behavior is needed, then a separate element can be used, and a JMS Topic can be referenced instead.

 <jms:publish-subscribe-channel id="jmsChannel" topic="exampleTopic"/>

For either type of JMS-backed channel, the name of the destination may be provided instead of a reference.

 <jms:channel id="jmsQueueChannel" queue-name="exampleQueueName"/>

 <jms:publish-subscribe-channel id="jmsTopicChannel" topic-name="exampleTopicName"/>

In the examples above, the Destination names would be resolved by Spring's default DynamicDestinationResolver implementation, but any implementation of the DestinationResolver interface could be provided. Also, the JMS ConnectionFactory is a required property of the channel, but by default the expected bean name would be "connectionFactory". The example below provides both a custom instance for resolution of the JMS Destination names and a different name for the ConnectionFactory.

 <jms:channel id="jmsChannel" queue-name="exampleQueueName"
              destination-resolver="customDestinationResolver"
              connection-factory="customConnectionFactory"/>