Two important points to note:
- A
connector is not essential depending on your use-case. You'll find that the default broker.xml doesn't have any connector elements defined. For example, if you just run ./artemis create the generated broker.xml will not have any connector elements.
- The documentation you cited is quite old (from the very first release of Artemis). You may benefit from reading the latest documentation which has been updated for clarity in many places.
As noted in both the documentation and the other Stack Overflow answer you cited, certain components in the broker need to connect to other brokers (e.g. core bridges, cluster-connections, etc.). A connector encapsulates the information necessary for these other components to make the connections they need. It's really as simple as that.
Now regarding your individual questions...
Even if this server is part of cluster, what is a role of connector?
In the case of a cluster using a broadcast-group and a discovery-group each node in the cluster needs to broadcast to all the other nodes in the cluster how the other nodes can connect to itself. It does this by broadcasting a connector which is referenced in the cluster-connection configuration. When the other nodes in the cluster receive this broadcast they take the connector information and use it to connect back to the node which broadcast it originally. In this way nodes can dynamically discover and connect to each other. It's also worth noting that in this case the connector configuration will essentially mirror one of the broker's acceptor configurations (since the connector will be used by other nodes to connect to the broadcasting node's acceptor). This is discussed further in the cluster documentation.
...connectors are used by a client to define how it connects to a server...
This bit of documentation you quoted is accurate but may be a bit confusing. Keep in mind that that a client can run anywhere, even within the broker itself. In the case of core bridges and cluster connections there is a client running in the broker which use the connector to determine how to connect to another broker. For what it's worth the updated documentation doesn't have this specific wording.
What does it mean "define how"?
A connector is the URL that the client needs to connect to the broker. The URL can simply include the host and port or it can contain lots of configuration details for the connection (e.g. SSL config).
Is connector always the same as acceptor..?
No, not always. In the case of a cluster they will be the same (or very close) for the reasons I already outlined, but in the case of a bridge they won't be the same.
What information does connector encapsulates..?
See above.
Why does stand-alone Broker have connector, for example by default creation ./artemis create?
It doesn't. See above.
What should we write in connector?
The URL needed to connect.
Can you give a simple example when acceptor and connector are different?
As mentioned previously, bridging is an example where different acceptors and connectors are used. ActiveMQ Artemis ships with a "core-bridge" example in the examples/features/standard directory which demonstrates different acceptors and connectors. The example involves 2 different brokers with one broker having a core bridge configured to send messages to the other broker. Here's the broker.xml with the bridge defined. You can see the acceptor listening on the localhost:61616 and the connector for localhost:61617. This connector points to the other broker which is listening on localhost:61617.
