I would like to publish a message to Active MQ using JMS or spring-jms from an application hosted inside IBM Websphere. Question is can I do that using JMS API or using spring-jms by adding the required libraries to the classpath ? or I have to configure JNDI lookup and other configurations in the WAS console ? If you can point me to any documentation that would be great.
You can certainly simply create your own connection factories, etc. programatically. You would still have access to the transaction manager and other container resources.
As already pointed out, deployment of the resource adapter is the preferred mechanism. This allows the JEE container to manage connection pools and provide JMS resources as container managed resources.
Please be aware that the ActiveMQ resource adapter deploys a number of Spring artifacts. Under the JEE specification, any classes that are deployed by a JCA adapter are on the classpath for all deployments. This can be very problematic.