JMS the way to go?

[RMMM]

I'm new to this kind of technology and trying to get some perspective.
I'm writing a software system for a business with about a half dozen
store locations. It's a system that will only be used internally and
(for the foreseeable future) have very low volume.  It will just perform
a few basic services involving db access.

I decided to use an asynchronous client server approach. I could just
write that from scatch, but I'm thinking, why reinvent the wheel? That's
what JMS is for and it has all the functionality that I'll probably ever need.

So my intention is to use JMS with, say, Apache ActiveMQ. (I'm using
plain old Java SE). My only worry is that it my be overkill and add
more complexity or overhead than necessary.

So should I write a simple system from scratch, or go to the other extreme
and use JMS?

Any advice/comments very much appreciated.

[rdblaha1]

Sorry for this being so late.  This was one of my first times in this particular forum and happened to see your post.

You had a couple of key phrases that would lead me to encourage you to use JMS.

Because you have multiple locations, i.e. stores, using JMS would be very helpful for assuring data gets returned to the correct store with Point-to-Point and general messages to be broadcast to all stores via the Topic.  You are right, Why re-invent the wheel?

Secondly you mentioned starting out small at first - few transactions, etc.  I believe using JMS from the start will help work with scalability in the future.  You should not have to go back and re-write code to upgrade as I believe you will eventually need or be greatly benefitted using JMS as you grow.

rdb