Hi, I think you are slightly confused. Let me try to explain it in a simple manner. Storm has a transport layer for communication between spouts and bolts. At present (release >=storm 0.9) there are two transport layer implementations provided by storm - zeromq and netty based implementations.You can select anyone of them. Installation of zeromq needs some special steps. It is already documented in storm project. I haven't tried Netty based implementation. However netty based implementation is supposed to give you better performance. http://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/64758709722/making-storm-fly-with-netty
Now let me try to answer your question related to ActiveMQ. For most of the realtime usecases people like to process messages from a queue. For such usecases the messages are read from these queues by the spout. You can use any queuing system(Kafka/RabbitMQ/ActiveMQ/...) for this activity. All that you need is a consumer in your spout to read these messages. Regards, Richards Peter.
