I keep a JMS connection always open, because I have a MessageListener on it.
Is it a common need to worry about minimizing maintenance of applications with long lived JMS connections?
I was thinking something along the lines of try to recover from some possible common well known kinds of failure, like temporary connectivity failure.
There’s nothing in the standard JMS spec that I know of that ensures that connectivity troubles won’t be visible to the application. Maybe there are some vendors who do this as an extension (as James Strachan suggests).
If you want a robust JMS client that isn’t dependent on vendor extensions, you need to handle errors and do reconnection. See Reconnecting JMS listener to JBossMQ (which, despite the title, isn’t JBossMQ-specific).