The original JMS spec first arrived in 2001 with JSR 914. At the time several enterprise messaging systems were already widely available however each had their own unique features and mechanisms which required software that wanted to talk on a given messaging bus to be tightly-coupled to the specific messaging system implementation in use.

Given that "tightly-coupled" is something you want to avoid in your enterprise systems, there was a push to abstract away these implementation-specific system aspects from the messaging client code. To address this, the JMS was developed to define a standardized, consistent programming interface that would work across different JMS-provider implementations. [Continue reading...] Guaranteed Topic Delivery using ActiveMQ Virtual Destinations