Message Queue

Message queues provide an asynchronous communications protocol, meaning that the sender and receiver of the message do not need to interact with the message queue at the same time.

Most messaging systems support both the publisher/subscriber and message queue models in their API

Features of Message Queue

Messages are queued asynchronously between applications and systems.

• Multiple providers can post messages to a queue
• There can be multiple message consumers attached to a single queue
• The queuing infrastructure ensures messages are delivered exactly once
• Messages can be successfully submitted to a queue even if the message consumer(s) for that queue are not running or are unreachable

Benefits

• Scalability
• Reliability
• Abstraction since producers and consumers aren’t directly interconnected

Implementation

There are a number of open source choices of messaging middleware systems, including Apache ActiveMQ, Apache Kafka, Apache RocketMQ, RabbitMQ, etc.

JMS VS AMQP

JMS

The Java Message Service (JMS) API is a Java Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) API for sending messages between two or more clients. JMS is a part of the Java Platform. It is a messaging standard that allows application components based on the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) to create, send, receive, and read messages. It allows the communication between different components of a distributed application to be loosely coupled, reliable, and asynchronous.

AMQP

The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open standard wire-level protocol for message-oriented middleware. The defining features of AMQP are message orientation, queuing, routing (including point-to-point and publish-and-subscribe`), reliability and security.

JMS is API and AMQP is a protocol. JMS is only a API spec. It doesn’t use any protocol. A JMS provider (like ActiveMQ) could be using any underlying protocol to realize the JMS API.

ActiveMQ vs RabbitMQ vs Kafka

• Throughput

  Kafka > RabbitMQ > ActiveMQ

• Latency

  RabbitMQ(Erlang) < Kafka(Scala&Java) < ActiveMQ(Java)

• Infrastructure

  RabbitMQ(AMQP, Distributed Platform)

  Kafka(Distributed streaming platform)

  ActiveMQ(JMS)