WebSphere Message Broker introduction

WebSphere Message Broker belongs to a family of business integration products that is available from IBM.

Business integration is the coordination and cooperation of all your business processes and applications. It involves bringing together the data and process intelligence in your enterprise, and harnessing these resources so that your applications and your users can achieve their business goals.

Business integration means that:

• You can connect customers, suppliers, partners, and service providers, with continuing security and control, to enable newly built and re-engineered applications for more effective business processes (for example, Supply Chain Management)
• You can make mergers and acquisitions a success by integrating dissimilar IT infrastructures from more than one company so that they can work together as a single entity.
• You can react more quickly to market trends and opportunities because your IT systems are flexible and dependable, and no longer constraining.
• You can overcome the barriers of diverse computer systems, geographic boundaries, time differences, language and format differences, and different methods of working.

WebSphere MQ messaging provides a secure and far-reaching communications infrastructure that you can expand with WebSphere Message Broker to apply intelligence to your business data as it travels through your network.

Transports
The main components of WebSphere Message Broker (the broker, the Configuration Manager, the User Name Server, and the Message Broker Toolkit) communicate by using the WebSphere MQ Enterprise Transportcommunications protocol.

Your business applications, which you can run on more than 30 industry platforms including hardware and software from IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems, Inc., can connect to the broker by using one of the supported protocols; for example, WebSphere MQ queues and connections, Web services, or WebSphere Adapters.

The benefit of using WebSphere MQ protocols (WebSphere MQ Enterprise Transport or WebSphere MQ Mobile Transport) is that they provide assured, once-only delivery of messages between the components.

WebSphere MQ protocols provide rich support for applications:

• The Message Queue Interface (MQI) and Application Messaging Interface (AMI) are supported in several programming languages.
• The point-to-point (including request/reply and client/server) and publish/subscribe application communication models are supported.
• The complexities of communications programming are handled by the messaging services and are therefore removed from the application logic.
• The applications can access other systems and interfaces through adapters and gateways to products such as Lotus® Domino®, Microsoft Exchange/Outlook, SAP/R3, and CICS® and IMS/ESA® products.

WebSphere Message Broker
WebSphere Message Broker provides a powerful broker solution driven by business rules. Messages are formed, routed, and transformed according to the rules that you define by using the workbench, a graphical user interface (GUI) that is supported by the Message Broker Toolkit.

Diverse applications can exchange information in dissimilar forms, with brokers handling the processing required for the information to arrive in the right place in the correct format, according to the rules that you have defined. The applications do not need to know anything except their own conventions and requirements.

Applications also have much greater flexibility in selecting which messages they want to receive, because they can specify a topic filter, or a content-based filter, or both, to control the messages that are made available to them.

WebSphere Message Broker provides a framework that supports supplied, basic, functions along with user-defined enhancements, to enable rapid construction and modification of business processing rules that are applied to messages in the system.

WebSphere Message Broker is complemented by various other IBM products such as WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) and WebSphere Transformation Extender (WTX).

Operational management

WebSphere Message Broker supports a choice of interfaces for operation and administration of your brokers:

• The Message Broker Toolkit.
• Applications that use the Configuration Manager Proxy (CMP) API.
• A comprehensive set of commands, that you can run interactively or by using scripts.
• WebSphere Message Broker is available in several modes, depending upon your requirements.

Using WebSphere Message Broker in your business :

WebSphere Message Broker addresses the needs of business and application integration by managing the flow of information. It provides services, based on message brokers, to allow you to:

• Route a message to several destinations, using rules that act on the contents of one or more of the fields in the message or message header.
• Transform a message, so that applications using different formats can exchange messages in their own formats.
• Store a message, or part of a message, in a database.
• Retrieve a message, or part of a message, from a database.
• Modify the contents of a message; for example, by adding data extracted from a database.
• Publish a message to make it available to other applications. Other applications can choose to receive publications that relate to specific topics, or that have specific content, or both.
• Create structured topic names, topic-based access control functions, content-based subscriptions, and subscription points.
• Use a public interface to develop message processing node types that can be incorporated into the broker framework to complement or replace the supplied nodes, or to incorporate node types developed by independent software vendors (ISVs).
• Enable instrumentation by products such as those developed by Tivoli, by using system management hooks.

The benefits of WebSphere Message Broker can be realized both within and outside your enterprise:
Your processes and applications can be integrated by providing message and data transformations in a single place, the broker. This integration helps to reduce the cost of application upgrades and modifications.

You can extend your systems to reach your suppliers and customers, by meeting their interface requirements within your brokers. This ability can help you to improve the quality of your interactions, and allow you to respond more quickly to changing or additional requirements.