by Bikram Sinha

Created on: May 03, 2009   Last Updated: May 05, 2009

IT industry has seen many revolutionary changes in the way applications talk together and exchange messages. In the earlier days, Microsoft's COM and OMG's CORBA showed us an iconic achievement in the world of distributed computing. It went from simple, point to point, homogeneous, single threaded applications to multithreaded, enterprise wise, service based, heterogeneous complex distributed applications. Therefore it was always a prime concern and a great field to research and develop how well the applications can exchange messages among them in an evolutionary, dynamic information world. In the advent of Service oriented Architecture, messaging has become the backbone of the enterprise applications. Therefore Message-Oriented-Middleware ( MOM ) became an integral and important part of the enterprise wise computing world.

Today's IT world is an ocean of information floating all around. It could be an E-commerce or E-Business or ERP or a SOA application. No matter what are the industry demands, integration is always a high profile subject among the experts and messaging became the part and parcel of this. We have seen point to point synchronous message communication and then loosely coupled asynchronous ("shoot and forget") message communication. Industry has always tried to cope up with the high volume messaging demand in this immensely complex and highly transacted application world.

There are many vendors who have already worked and still working on the messaging products. The goal is how efficiently and quickly large volume of messages can be delivered without much network traffic with adequate fault tolerance. The application should be smart enough to recover any disaster or avoid duplicate transfer of the message. Also the number of messages, the throughput, is one of the main criteria to consider. The product also should be versatile enough to work with any third party application or product without much integration issue, either through adapters or connector architecture. It also should support different operating systems, proprietary and open source messaging protocols. It should handle the memory consumption and CPU utilization on the servers to the optimized level.

All the big companies like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Tibco, and Sonic have spent an enormous amount of time and resources to build up solid and scalable messaging products.

IBM WebSphere MQ is one of the most mature and best of breed messaging products that I can think of. WebSphere is strong

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