Today I needed to send some JMS messages to ActiveMQ. Instead of firing up eclipse, creating a maven project to get the dependencies, and then writing some Java code, I used sbt and Scala to create a REPL where I could easily send JMS messages.

Create an sbt project

The first step is to create an sbt project. This is as simple as creating a directory with a build.sbt file in it. My example build.sbt file pulls in two library dependencies that I want to have available in the REPL.

name := "jmstest"

scalaVersion := "2.9.1"
libraryDependencies ++= Seq(
  "org.apache.activemq" % "activemq-core" % "5.5.1",
  "org.slf4j" % "slf4j-simple" % "1.6.4"
)

Run the REPL

Running the REPL is as simple as running sbt console from the newly created sbt project. From there, it's off to the races:

import javax.jms._
import org.apache.activemq.ActiveMQConnectionFactory

val factory = new ActiveMQConnectionFactory("tcp://localhost:61616")
val connection = factory.createConnection
val session = connection.createSession(false, Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE)
val destination = session.createTopic("jms.test")
val producer = session.createProducer(destination)
val message = session.createMapMessage
message.setString("command", "basic_setup")
message.setBoolean("do_stuff", false)
producer.send(message)

That's all there is to it. Scala, with the help of sbt, makes a great REPL for testing out Java libraries.