Middleware: Computing's unsung hero
Published: 01 Feb 2005 17:20 GMT
There are two basic components to 'message oriented' middleware: the message and the queue. The messages can range in size from millions of bytes worth of data down to just one or two bytes, transmitting data such as order records or customer payment details. But each message has to be sent only once -- or this could lead to problems such as duplicated orders, which then have to be cancelled.
Using MQ these messages are put into a mailbox known as a queue, and the message then stays there until it is needed, so that users can get access to the business information when they're ready to, and in the order they want it. Not exactly revolutionary, you might think -- but it was a major shift in the way systems communicate, and a massive engineering project.
Tony Storey, IBM Fellow, and one of the original inventors of WebSphere MQ, says work started on the software around 1987, when companies in the financial sector began to run into a new kind of problem with their IT systems.
"A lot of companies had installed different kinds of systems that ran on different operating systems and different protocols and it was incredibly difficult and costly to integrate them," he explains.
"We tried to define a set of standard APIs and a standard protocol to run on all the systems to link them together. The more difficult task was trying to provide an implementation that ran on all these different platforms. This was a big software engineering challenge," Storey says. And in 1998 IBM added the MQ message broker, moving the middleware from a point to point, to a hub and spoke architecture, extending its use further.
"We live in this incredibly networked world and there are so many pervasive devices out there and this is the technology that ties all of this together," Storey says.
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