We’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on over at the Message-Oriented Middleware Association, and its attempt to create some common messaging interfaces. IBM Corp MQSeries manager Steve Craggs’s parting shot before he headed off to Candle Corp (CI No 3,007) was the suggestion that the Message-Oriented gang roll over and throw its lot in with MQSeries interfaces. The Message-Oriented Middleware board choked on that suggestion, but claims there’s still wind in its sails. It says it is currently taking a fresh look at various options and Message-Oriented Middleware Association president Bob Scher, also director of strategic alliances at PeerLogic Inc, is confident it will have a position on some common messaging techniques by year-end that will deliver some measure of interoperability or co-existence between products. At issue is whether the Middleware Association pursues the goal of common or federated application programming interfaces or standardization on a protocol at the wire level. Given that distributed object computing is expected to provide messaging with a leg-up into the market, couldn’t Object Management Group’s Internet Inter-ORB Protocol transport be used? The Middleware Association members tell us it is fine for ORB-to-ORB communications but not much use to messaging, although they suppose Internet Inter-ORB Protocol, IIOP, could eventually be implemented over a messaging application programming interface. The Association counts 30 members now and promises a major conference and user meeting next year. Its problem is that MQSeries is gobbling up the market and Microsoft Corp’s own messaging system, Falcon, will soon be flying all over its ground. Craggs, by the way, doesn’t see much of a future for any other products. Message-oriented middleware supports the transmission of instructions rather than documents or files, which are executed on receipt by processes running on distributed systems. A process running on one system can instruct or address a process on another system over a network asynchronously, and unlike remote procedure calls, which literally invoke remote procedures onto the local system, transmits multiple messages and handles responses when they arrive. The message can use a variety of formats and delivery of the message is entrusted to the middleware. A process could be in an application, a database management system or an operating system. In heterogeneous environments, clients have to exchange information across networks using multiple communications protocols and operating systems environments. Candle vice-president of solutions for network applications Steve Craggs believes that Momentum Software Corp, PeerLogic Inc and the other middleware vendors’ efforts to define common messaging interfaces through the Message-Oriented Middleware Association is a non-issue because in reality there won’t be any application programming interfaces to choose from, just IBM MQSeries and Microsoft Falcon. All other discussion is a red herring. Craggs is the former IBM MQSeries business manager who cheekily asked the Middleware Association to adopt the MQSeries application programming interfaces as its standard before he hopped to Candle.
