IBM WebSphere Message Broker

WebSphere Message Broker (WMB) is IBM's integration broker from the WebSphere product family that allows business information to flow between disparate applications across multiple hardware and software platforms. Rules can be applied to the data flowing through the message broker to route and transform the information. The product is considered to be an Enterprise Service Bus providing connectivity between applications and services in a Service Oriented Architecture.

History

Originally the product was developed by NEON (New Era of Networks) Inc., a company which was acquired by Sybase in 2001. The product was developed by New Era of Networks and re-branded as an IBM product called 'MQSeries Integrator' (or 'MQSI' for short). Versions of MQSI ran up to 2.0. The product was added to the WebSphere family and rebranded 'WebSphere MQ Integrator', at version 2.1. After 2.1 the version numbers became more synchronized with the rest of the WebSphere family and jumped to version 5.0. The name changed to 'WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker' (WBIMB). In this version the development environment was redesigned using Eclipse and support for Web services was integrated into the product. Since version 6.0 the product has been known as 'WebSphere Message Broker'. WebSphere Message Broker version 7.0 was announced in October 2009, and WebSphere Message Broker version 8.0 announced in October 2011

Components

WebSphere Message Broker consists of the following components:

• WebSphere Message Broker runtime
• WebSphere Message Broker Toolkit
• WebSphere Message Broker Explorer

How Message Broker works

Overview

The WebSphere Message Broker runtime reduces cost and complexity of IT systems by unifying the method a company uses to implement interfaces between disparate systems. WMB runtime forms the Enterprise Service Bus of a Service Oriented Architecture by efficiently increasing the flexibility of connecting unlike systems into a unified, homogeneous architecture. The key feature of the WMB product is the ability to abstract the business logic away from transport or protocol specifics.

The WebSphere Message Broker Toolkit enables developers to graphically design mediations, known as message flows, and related artifacts. Once developed, these resources can be packaged into a broker archive (BAR) file and deployed into the runtime environment. At this point, the broker is able to continually process messages according to the logic described by the message flow. A wide variety of data formats are supported, and may be modeled using standard XML Schema and DFDL schema.

WebSphere Message Broker flows can be used in a Service Oriented Architecture, and if properly designed by Middleware Analysts, integrated into event-driven SOA schemas, sometimes referred to as SOA 2.0. Businesses rely on the processing of events, which might be part of a business process, such as issuing a trade order, purchasing an insurance policy, reading data using a sensor, or monitoring information gathered about IT infrastructure performance. WebSphere Message Broker includes rich complex-event-processing capabilities that enable analysis of events to perform validation, enrichment, transformation and intelligent routing of messages based on a set of business rules.

A developer creates WMB functionality in a cyclical workflow, probably more agile than most other software development. Developers will create a message flow, generate a BAR file, deploy the message flow contained in the BAR file, test the message flow and repeat as necessary to achieve reliable functionality.

Expected Performance

IBM publishes performance reports for WebSphere Message Broker which provide sample throughput figures. Performance varies depending on message sizes, message volumes, processing complexity (such as complexity of message transformations), system capacities (CPU, memory, network, etc.), software version and patch levels, configuration settings, and other factors. Some published tests demonstrate message rates in excess of 10,000 per second in particular configurations.

Broker nodes available

A developer can choose from many pre-designed broker 'nodes', which are used to build up a message flow. Nodes have different purposes. Some nodes map data from one format to another (for instance, Cobol or PL/I Copybook to canonical XML). Other nodes evaluate content of data and route the flow differently based on certain criteria

Node types

There are many types of node that can be used in developing message flows; the following node transformation technology options are available:

• Graphical Mapping using DFDL (as of version 8.0)
• eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)
• Java (as of version 6)
• .NET (as of version 8.0)
• PHP (as of version 6.1.0.3)
• Extended Structured Query Language (ESQL)
• JMS nodes
• Database nodes
• MQ's Managed File Transfer
• Connect:Direct (Managed File Transfer)
• FTP nodes
• SAP nodes
• SCA nodes
• WebSphere Transformation Extender (formerly known as Ascential DataStage TX, DataStage TX and Mercator Integration Broker) is available as a separate licensing option (Note: Since WMB Version 8 DFDL parser, WTX is considered a legacy product.)
• Email nodes

Patterns

A pattern captures a commonly recurring solution to a problem (example: Request-Reply pattern). The specification of a pattern describes the problem being addressed, why the problem is important, and any constraints on the solution. Patterns typically emerge from common usage and the application of a particular product or technology. A pattern can be used to generate customized solutions to a recurring problem in an efficient way. We can do this pattern recognition or development through a process called service oriented modeling.

WebSphere Message Broker version 7 introduced patterns that:

• Provide guidance in implementing solutions
• Increase development efficiency because resources are generated from a set of predefined templates
• Improve quality through asset reuse and common implementation of functions such as error handling and logging

The patterns cover a range of categories including file processing, application integration, and message based integration.

Pattern Examples

• Fire-and-Forget (FaF)
• Request-Reply (RR)
• Aggregation (Ag)
• Sequential (Seq)

Supported platforms

Operating systems

Further information: Comparison of business integration software#Operating system support

Currently available platforms for WebSphere Message Broker are:

• AIX
• HP-UX (IA64)
• Solaris (SPARC and x86-64)
• Linux (x86, x86-64, PPC and System z)
• Microsoft Windows
• z/OS

See also

• Comparison of business integration software

External links

• FAQs
• Product page
• Product documentation
• WebSphere Message Broker on developerWorks
• What's new in the latest release
• Introducing the WebSphere sMash PHPCompute node in WebSphere Message Broker
• Enterprise Service Bus and Connectivity Patterns
• Introduction to Patterns in WebSphere Message Broker
• WebSphere Message Broker Basics Redbook
• Connecting Your Business Using IBM WebSphere Message Broker V7 as an ESB