Is HornetQ tightly coupled to JBoss Application server?
HornetQ has zero dependencies on any JBoss Application server components, in fact HornetQ core has zero dependencies on any libraries other than the core JDK and Netty! Although HornetQ can be easily integrated in JBoss Application Server as the JMS provider, it can also be run as a fully functional completely independent standalone messaging server outside of JBoss Application Server, or it can be instantiated in your dependency injection framework of choice, e.g. Spring or Google Guice. You can even embed HornetQ directly in your own applications.