Message oriented middleware

Message Oriented Middleware

Because businesses, institutions, and technologies change continually, the software systems that serve them must be able to accommodate such changes. Following a merger, the addition of a service, or the expansion of available services, a business can ill afford to recreate its information systems. It is at this most critical point that it needs to integrate new components or to scale existing ones as efficiently as possible. The easiest way to integrate heterogeneous components is not to recreate them as homogeneous elements but to provide a layer that allows them to communicate despite their differences. This layer, called middleware, allows software components (applications, enterprise java beans, servlets, and other components) that have been developed independently and that run on different networked platforms to interact with one another. It is when this interaction is possible that the network can become the computer.

Applications distributed on different network nodes use the application interface to communicate without having to be concerned with the details of the operating environments that host other applications nor with the services that connect them to these applications. In addition, by providing an administrative interface, this new, virtual system of interconnected applications can be made reliable and secure. Its performance can be measured and tuned, and it can be scaled without losing function.

Middleware can be grouped into the following categories:

Remote Procedure Call or RPC-based middleware
Object Request Broker or ORB-based middleware
Message Oriented Middleware or MOM-based middleware

All these models make it possible for one software component to affect the behavior of another component over a network. They are different in that RPC- and ORB-based middleware create systems of tightly-coupled components, whereas MOM-based systems allow for a looser coupling of components. In an RPC- or ORB-based system, when one procedure calls another, it must wait for the called procedure to return before it can do anything else. In these synchronous messaging models, the middleware functions partly as a super-linker, locating the called procedure on a network and using network services to pass function or method parameters to the procedure and then to return results.

Advantages

Using a MOM system, a client makes an API call to send a message to a destination managed by the provider. The call invokes provider services to route and deliver the message. Once it has sent the message, the client can continue to do other work, confident that the provider retains the message until a receiving client retrieves it. The message-based model, coupled with the mediation of the provider, makes it possible to create a system of loosely-coupled components.

A messaging provider mediate messaging between clients is that by adding an administrative interface, you can monitor and tune performance. Client applications are thus effectively relieved of every problem except that of sending, receiving, and processing messages. It is up to the code that implements the MOM system and up to the administrator to resolve issues like interoperability, reliability, security, scalability, and performance.