When to use Java and Message Broker?

Question

I am a developer at my office where SOA development is at its peaks. We use IBM MQ, IBM Message Broker and Java/J2EE Technologies.

I have been currently put into project where Message Broker is used to develop a middleware which interacts between two applications. I am not quite sure if Message Broker is the right option for such kind of a project since Java can do the same piece of work in a much efficient way, which led me to search Internet for advantages in using the two.

I read in different sites that Message Broker is used to transform,route and enhance messages, this can very well be done using java efficiently. So this led me to this question "When to use Java and When to use Message Broker for development?" It would be great if someone can help me with the advantages of using the two.

-RDJ

Answer 1

Websphere Message Broker is an ESB whereas Java on the other hand is a programming language . There are ESBs which use Java as their implementation language like Axis , Fuse but are they powerful enough to parse XMLs , orchestrate services , integrate with mainframe systems .Webservice design and development in Message Broker is easy and user -friendly .ESQL as correctly pointed out is powerful for XML transformation and processing is the implementaion language used in Message Broker . Again , integration with MQ , HTTP , File nodes is seamless and efficent in MB .

Answer 2

Message brokers enable e.g. operations people to monitor all integrations in one place. Also, if a data format changes it can be trivial to determine which integrations are affected by the change.

Each individual integration could probably be implemented in Java (or any other language, for that matter), but you'd end up but with a bunch of point-to-point integrations, which is one of the problems message brokers try to solve.

If you were to design a generalized transformation/routing solution in Java, you would be designing a message broker :) Which would be interesting, but not really necessary, seeing as plenty of commercial and open source message brokers are already available.