Exclusive Consumer, Exclusive Queues

In Apache ActiveMQ, Exclusive Consumer or Exclusive Queues avoids the end user having to pin anything.

The broker will pick a single MessageConsumer to get all the messages for a queue to ensure ordering. If that consumer fails, the broker will auto failover and choose another consumer.

So the effect is a heterogeneous J2EE cluster where each JVM has the same setup and configuration; the broker is choosing one consumer to be the master and send all the messages to it in order until it dies; then you get immediate failover to another consumer.

For those who've struggled with pinning JMS consumers in J2EE clusters you'll immediately realize how useful this is to making clustered, high available distributed services.