MQ and MB

MQ and MB together form a middleware tool that is developed by IBM and dwells under the Web Sphere umbrella of IBM products. Web Sphere has many different tools under it, and MQ/MB products are peculiarly used for the middleware. There are following products, MQ, Message Broker and Work Flow products. Message Broker has one sub product called Event Broker that is widely used in pub/sub message transformation capabilities.
The Queues are the temporary storage place that only holds the messages in it till it is been picked up by another queue or by the Message Broker. The Message Queue’s work only is to transfer the messages from one queue to another, using different concepts like MQI, Clusters, Queue Sharing Groups etc and it makes sure no message is lost or duplicated in that process. The transfer process of MQ is most robust as it takes complete responsibility in handling the messages well. In this process it uses different types of Queues, different channels, and process definitions to manage the messages placed in it. There are two ways to transfer the messages. They are Pass-Through Messages and Transformed messages. In case of Pass-Through Messages, the messages are directly sent from Queues to the external application, but the messages would be as it is. If the messages have to be transformed or filtered out, or mapped according to the requirements of the external applications then it falls in the category of the transformed messages. These messages must be sent from the queues to the Message Broker, to get it transformed. Message Broker has this capability to transform, filter, and Map the messages and then route it to the correct destination Queue in MQ. To do this processing, Message Broker also has many objects and concepts. It uses its proprietary language called ESQL [Extended SQL] that does the required processing of the message. Apart from this it also uses Java language to work with it. It has its own classes that are to be deployed in directory and then to be imported in the Java Compute Node.
I sometimes wonder, how well the logical and proper separation of the functionality is been done in these two products. Apart from this it does provide the superb methodology for monitoring our messages using monitoring tools provided in the product itself, or by other IBM Monitoring tools. Also the third party monitoring tools can be configured to monitor the whole system. There is an Alert and Notification system set up along with the API and security exits to provide instant information about any failure.
I truly admire this tool and love to work with it.

The Message Queue and the Message Broker,
Takes your message, here to there,
The way you want the way to send,
Yes, its commands, take all the care.