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The HornetQ REST interface allows you to leverage the reliability and scalability features of HornetQ over a simple REST/HTTP interface. Messages are produced and consumed by sending and receiving simple HTTP messages that contain the content you want to push around. For instance, here's a simple example of posting an order to an order processing queue express as an HTTP message:
POST /queue/orders/create HTTP/1.1 Host: example.com Content-Type: application/xml <order> <name>Bill</name> <item>iPhone 4</item> <cost>$199.99</cost> </order>
As you can see, we're just posting some arbitrary XML document to a URL. When the XML is received on the server is it processed within HornetQ as a JMS message and distributed through core HornetQ. Simple and easy. Consuming messages from a queue or topic looks very similar. We'll discuss the entire interface in detail later in this docbook.
Why would you want to use HornetQ's REST interface? What are the goals of the REST interface?
Easily usable by machine-based (code) clients.
Zero client footprint. We want HornetQ to be usable by any client/programming language that has an adequate HTTP client library. You shouldn't have to download, install, and configure a special library to interact with HornetQ.
Lightweight interoperability. The HTTP protocol is strong enough to be our message exchange protocol. Since interactions are RESTful the HTTP uniform interface provides all the interoperability you need to communicate between different languages, platforms, and even messaging implementations that choose to implement the same RESTful interface as HornetQ (i.e. the REST-* effort.)
No envelope (i.e. SOAP) or feed (i.e. Atom) format requirements. You shouldn't have to learn, use, or parse a specific XML document format in order to send and receive messages through HornetQ's REST interface.
Leverage the reliability, scalability, and clustering features of HornetQ on the back end without sacrificing the simplicity of a REST interface.