Let's change the default transport protocol used in ServiceMix 3

Today I want to post about a potential issue that I came across recently when running tests using the FUSE ESB (which is IONA's distribution of Apache ServiceMix).

Currently ServiceMix 3.2 configures the underlying ActiveMQ broker to simply use tcp as the transport protocol. This is defined in conf/servicemix.properties:

activemq.url = tcp://${activemq.host}:${activemq.port}

While this configuration works fine and is sufficient for using ServiceMix in development, it will not recover from any network failures and is therefore not suitable for running in a production system. In case of a network failure or connection inactivity timeout, ActiveMQ will simply raise an exception but won't try to reconnect. You will need to restart ServiceMix in order to recover from such error. For automatic reconnection to happen, the failover protocol should be used instead. Hence the default configuration should be changed to

activemq.url = failover://(tcp://${activemq.host}:${activemq.port})

The failover protocol should really be the default protocol and enabled out of the box. I logged SM-1302.