MessageQueue vs Message Broker

MQ is a solution for application-to-application communication services regardless of where your applications or data reside. Whether on a single server, separate servers of the same type, or separate servers of different architecture types, MQ facilitates communications between applications by sending and receiving message data via messaging queues. Applications then use the information in these messages to interact with Web browsers, business logic, and databases. MQ provides a secure and reliable transport layer for moving data unchanged in the form of messages between applications but it is not aware of the content of the messages. MQ uses a set of small and standard application programming interfaces (APIs) that support a number of programming languages, including Visual Basic, NATURAL, COBOL, Java, and C across all platforms.

Message Broker is built to extend MQ, and it is capable of understanding the content of each message that it moves through the Broker. Customers can define the set of operations on each message depending on its content. The message processing nodes supplied with Message Broker are capable of processing messages from various sources, such as Java Message Service (JMS) providers, HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) calls, or data read from files. By connecting these nodes with each other, customers can define linked operations on a message as it flows from one application to its destination.

Message Broker can do the following:

    * Matches and routes communications between services

    * Converts between different transport protocols

    * Transforms message formats between requestor and service

    * Identifies and distributes business events from disparate sources

Together, MQ and Message Broker deliver a comprehensive publish and subscribe facility, connecting Message Broker’s broad transport and format support to MQ’s messaging backbone. Message Broker extends the MQ publish and subscribe functionality with advanced function such as content-based publish and subscribe by means of an enhanced Publication node. The two products share a common publish and subscribe domain for topic- and content-based operations

Java Perspective :

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Message Broker - The message-oriented middleware server that hosts messaging destinations (i.e., queues and topics) for the purposes of asynchronous communication. Sometimes known as a queue manager

Message Queue - A messaging destination that uses a queue data structure to hold messages and is hosted by the message broker. The alternative to a queue is a topic which provides publish/subscribe semantics.

Resource Adapter - A Java EE Resource Adapter is a component that allows communication between a Java EE application and an enterprise information system such as a database server, a messaging server, a CRM server, an ERP server, etc.