What is an MQ and why do I want to use it?

Question

On my team at work, we use the IBM MQ technology a lot for cross-application communication. I\'ve seen lately on Hacker News and other places about other MQ technologies like Ra

Answer 1

MQ stands for messaging queue.

It's an abstraction layer that allows multiple processes (likely on different machines) to communicate via various models (e.g., point-to-point, publish subscribe, etc.). Depending on the implementation, it can be configured for things like guaranteed reliability, error reporting, security, discovery, performance, etc.

You can do all this manually with sockets, but it's very difficult.

For example: Suppose you want to processes to communicate, but one of them can die in the middle and later get reconnected. How would you ensure that interim messages were not lost? MQ solutions can do that for you.