Which transport protocol does Open MQ use?

Question

I heard a guy from IBM give a talk about MQTT and he said that MQTT is the most lightweight messaging protocol as of today. His argument was that the smallest overhead produced for a single message is 2 bytes. However, I've heard the very same (2 bytes overhead) about HTML5 WebSockets too? Anyways, as I plan to use Open MQ as a JMS provider for a messaging application, which protocol my provider use became of interest to me. I cannot anywhere find the answer to that question and I even googled the Open MQ documentation and the documentation of GlassFish which use Open MQ as a JMS provider. Some blog posts and the like on Internet says AMQP but I cannot find a solid reference to back that statement up.

Which protocol does Open MQ use, and how would you know?

Answer 1

I think you mix a few things up: MQTT is an application level protocol and uses TCP as transport protocol. MQTT can also be used with Websockets as transport. MQTT is, if you will, a lightweight alternative to JMS and AMQP.

AMQP is a popular and reliable alternative to JMS and is well suited for business and mission critical messaging. It is very feature rich and widely used. Note that AMQP is a messaging protocol while JMS is an API (which can even use AMQP as transport). You can use AMQP directly in Java Applications with Libraries such as the RabbitMQ Java Client.

MQTT on the other hand is perfect fit for telemetry data and scenarios where you have many clients which communicate with a single message broker and where low bandwidth usage, memory efficiency and battery life on the clients is key.

JMS does not define any transport protocol (in contrast to MQTT) and anything could be used here. I personally think TCP is a good fit here, too.

I do not know about OpenMQ but for JMS and AMQP I can recommend ActiveMQ. For MQTT there are a few brokers out there including HiveMQ and Mosquitto.

Obligatory Disclaimer: I am a developer of HiveMQ, so I am probably a bit biased ;-)