Although its stated aim is to shape the future of message-oriented middleware, the one-year-old Message-Oriented Middleware Association is not about to begin treading on its sponsors toes by seeking a standard that will govern messaging software. Introducing its white paper, Building Your Enterprise Information Infrastructure With Message Oriented Middleware, the Association, which has stolen MOMA, the acronym by which Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art is universally known (as in MoMA Knows Best), conceded the likelihood of interoperable messaging middleware is still way off. Bob Scher, president, and also director of strategic alliances at PeerLogic Inc, said this kind of problem will be addressed by the market over time and said the association’s task is only to educate the industry about messaging. Messaging software has traditionally implied functions such as electronic mail and facsimile. But message-oriented middleware supports the transmission of software instructions – rather than documents of files – which are executed on receipt by processes running on distributed systems. It enables a process on one system to instruct or address a process on another system over a network asynchronously, and – unlike remote procedure calls which invoke remote procedures onto the local system – transmits multiple messages and handles responses when they arrive. The message format can be one of several different guises 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 with database servers across a network, using different communications protocols and operating systems. MQSeries and message-oriented middleware in general is in the business of getting this information across, said Steve Craggs, business manager of IBM Corp’s MQSeries messaging software based in Hursley, UK. Its emphasis is on the need to ensure instructions are delivered as quickly as possible, provide greater support for guaranteed delivery and high performance as well as network protocols. The more systems and protocols the message-oriented supplier supports, the more useful it will be in the heterogeneous environment. The MQSeries supports 18 different systems and an array of protocol stacks. Craggs admitted message-oriented middleware vendors could do with some standards of their own, but expects them to arrive in de facto fashion, by the market’s decision. IBM’s MQSeries, Digital Equipment Corp’s MessageQ and Momentum Inc’s Message Express are just three examples of messaging and queuing systems that each have a different method of execution.
