Message broker vs. MOM (Message-Oriented Middleware)

Question

I\'m a little confused as to what the difference is between a message broker e.g. RabbitMQ and Message-orientated Middleware. I can\'t find much info apart from what\'s on Wikip

Answer 1

"MOM" broadly means any technology that can deliver "messages" from one user-space application to another. A message is usually understood to be a discrete piece of information, as compared to a stream.

MOM products used to be quite large and complex: CORBA, JMS, TIBCO, WebsphereMQ, etc. and tried to do a lot more than simply deliver messages.

A broker is a particular set of routing and queuing patterns, and we usually use the term "broker" specifically in MOM (as compared to HTTP, email, XMPP, etc.) Routing means, one message goes to one peer, to one of many peers, to all of many peers, etc. Queuing means messages are held in memory or disk until they can be delivered (and in some cases, acknowledged).

AMQP used to specific those broker patters, so an application could rely on consistent behavior from any AMQP-compatible broker (thus RabbitMQ and OpenAMQ looked much the same to a client app, like two HTTP or two XMPP servers would look the same). AMQP/1.0 specifies just the connection between nodes, so you don't have guarantees of behavior. This makes AMQP/1.0 much easier for firms to implement, but doesn't deliver interoperability.

ZeroMQ is message-oriented middleware that defines, like AMQP/1.0, the connections between pieces rather than the behaviour of a central broker. However it's relatively easy to write MOM brokers using 0MQ, and we've done a few of these (like Majordomo).

Answer 2

Message brokers are one (quite popular) kind of MOM. Another kind of MOM would be brokerless MOM, like ZeroMQ. With broker based MOM, all messages go to one central place: broker, and get distributed from there. Broker less MOM usually allows for peer to peer messaging (but does not exclude option of central server as well) .

AMQP is broker based MOM protocol definition (at least all versions prior to 1.0, which drifts into more general MOM), and there are several different Message brokers implementing that protocol, RabbitMQ is just one of them.

Answer 3

An overview -

• A protocol - A set of rules.
• AMQP - AMQP is an open internet protocol for reliably sending and receiving messages.
• MOM (message-oriented-middleware) - is an approach, an architecture for distributed system i.e. a middle layer for the whole distributed system, where there's lot of internal communication (a component is querying data, and then needs to send it to the other component, which will be doing some processing on the data) so components have to share info/data among them.
• Message broker - is any system (in MOM) which handles messages (sending as well as receiving), or to be more precise which routes messages to the specific consumer/recipient. A Message Broker is typically built upon a MOM. The MOM provides the base communication among the applications, and things like message persistence and guaranteed delivery. "Message brokers are a building block of Message oriented middleware."
• Rabbitmq - a message broker; a MOM implementation; an open-source implementation of AMQP; as per Wikipedia:

  RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software (sometimes called message-oriented middleware) that implements the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP).

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As you asked:

When searching MOM I find info on AMQP which states is a protocol for MOM.. what does this mean?

MOM is about having a messaging middleware (middle layer) between (distributed) system components, and AMQP is protocol (set of rules) for reliably sending and receiving messages. So, a MOM implementation (i.e. Rabbitmq) may use AMQP.

What is MOM then?

Message-Oriented-Middleware - is an approach, an architecture for distributed system i.e. a middle layer for the whole distributed system, where there's lot of internal communication (a component is querying data, and then needs to send it to the other component, which will be doing some processing on the data) so components have to share info/data among them. In short it's a way to design a system, for example: depending upon the overall requirements we need to develop a distributed system, with some internal communication. The biggest advantage of MOM architecture/decision is decoupling of the components i.e. if we're going to change the data query component it'll have no effect on the data processing components, as they're communicating via MOM (e.g. Rabbitmq Cluster) - the data processing component is getting the data in form messages, which then parses and processes them.

MOM at the end is just a design decision, that we use a middleware for gluing our system (distributed) components, a middleware for handling communication between them, in the form of messages (i.e. JSON). To implement a message-oriented-middleware we need more - set of specific rules i.e. how the messages will be published, consumed, how the acknowledgement will work, the lifetime of a message is until it is consumed, the persistence of a message, etc. AMQP is basically these set of rules i.e. a standard/protocol for implementing a MOM i.e. a messaging system using AMQP, means it confines itself by the stated rules. From Wikipedia:

AMQP mandates the behavior of the messaging provider and client to the extent that implementations from different vendors are inter-operable, in the same way as SMTP, HTTP, FTP, etc. have created inter-operable systems.

I also have read that RabbitMQ implements the AMPQ protocol.. so why does that make a RabbitMQ a message broker?

Yes, Rabbitmq is a message broker (publisher -> exchange -> queue -> consumer). It's an open source AMQP implementation i.e. a messaging system/broker which confines to AMQP (the AMQP rules) - one can use Rabbitmq as the middleware, hence MOM.

AMQP - is just a set of rules i.e .how messages will be published, kept (in queues), consumed, delivery acknowledgement, etc.

Are a message broker and MOM the same thing?

In simple words, Yes. If we need to go with MOM design for our distributed system, we can simply use Rabbitmq (a message broker; an AMQP implementation) as the middleware.