I am trying to understand the JMS concepts and came across below statement from document http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/1.4/tutorial/doc/JMS3.html:
A JMS provider is a messaging system that implements the JMS interfaces and provides administrative and control features. An implementation of the Java EE platform includes a JMS provider.
What are administrative and control features that are provided by JMS provider?
JMS providers implement the JMS specification. These:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Message_Service#Provider_implementations
As a part of their implementation they often provide insights into the message queue and realtime insights into usage, and also allow you to administer messages outside of the underlying architecture implementation. The degree to which they do that varies considerably between the providers. Administration and control is not officially a part of the specification. It is a byproduct of the maturity of the provider and the level of control at which they want to give you as a developer.
A JMS provider sometimes is also known as JMS broker. It provides the service that manages JMS sessions, JMS queue/topic destinations, etc. You can think it as a server that dispatches the message between message sender/receiver. Some administrative and control features are sometimes provided by a specific JMS provider, e.g. a web console. Apache ActiveMQ is one such example implementation of JMS provider.
