Note: I am in to JMS and active MQ.
I am writing an application and would like to use Active MQ as Queue for queuing up processing request and have them consumed by the next available node in a distributed system. (One producer many consumers)

In the JMS spec it says that the behavior of a point to point (Queue) with mutiple consumers is "undefined".
The behavior I want is that each consumer would get the next message available and only one consumer would get any single message. You know, like a queue.

What I observe in Active MQ is what I would expect. Even the use of client AKK messages seem to work the way I would expect. That is, in client ACK mode the message is only sent to one consumer but if that consumer dies without ACKing the message, the message is re posted to the queue.

My question is, are my observations correct and is this expected behavior for Active MQ and can I rely on this behavior.

Thanks,
Brian Mason
bmason@chrome.com