Overview

It is unusual to find an application that does not need to exchange data with other applications. In addition, it is becoming common for this data exchange to happen automatically across digital communication links (for example, the Internet). A large number of these interfaces still use custom designs, so that new users of an interface frequently need to write all or part of the exchange mechanism from scratch rather than using a standard pre-written module. SOAP over HTTP is a well-defined open standard for data exchange, which forms the basis for Web services. For more details, see the SOAP Web Services white paper on the JADE Web site at https://www.jadeworld.com/jade-platform/developer-centre/documentation/white-papers.

IBM and Microsoft offer proprietary message queuing subsystems (WebSphere MQ and Microsoft MQ, respectively), which are available for multiple operating systems and hardware architectures. However, these queuing subsystems require considerable experience to implement.

The messaging framework is a basic generic message exchange module that provides a wrapper for the standard IBM WebSphere MQ message queuing transport and for a JADE message queuing transport.

The generic module interface provides a high performance subsystem that enables developers to:

• Handle a wide range of underlying transports within a common framework.

• Write code that works regardless of the transport chosen at run time. (Some transports require a specific code structure to work correctly; notably transaction integration.)

• Switch between transports without changing any logic other than the queue name.

• Access transport-specific features.

• Access standard external transports (for example, IBM WebSphere MQ).

• Minimize the amount of JADE code written.

• Use an event-driven processing model.