How to connect Glassfish 3 to an external ActiveMQ 5 broker

Introduction

Here at ONVZ we’re using Glassfish 3 as our development and production application server, and we’re quite happy with its performance and stability, as well as the large community surrounding it. I rarely run into a problem that does not have a matching solution on stackoverflow or java.net. As part of our open source strategy we also run a customized ActiveMQ cluster called “ONVZ Message Bus”.

To enable Message Driven Beans and other EJBs to consume and produce messages to and from the ActiveMQ message brokers, ignoring the internal OpenMQ broker that comes shipped with Glassfish, an ActiveMQ Resource Adapter has to be installed. Luckily for me Sven Hafner wrote a blog post about running an embedded ActiveMQ 5 broker in Glassfish 3, and I was able to distill the information I needed to connect to an external broker instead. This blog post describes what I did to get it to work.