To clarify Jeff's answer a bit: The MessagingServer you created is a "core" server. A core server knows nothing about JMS - it's completely JMS agnostic, therefore it knows nothing about topics. This is discussed in the user manual: http://www.jboss.org/file-access/default/members/jbossmessaging/freezone/... Now, the question I would ask is, if embedding do you really want JMS? Why not just use the core API? It's simpler and it can do everything that JMS does (and more) View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4240987#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...