Treffer: Making the Case for Asynchronous Transport Standardization.

This article deals with standards-based, service-oriented architectures and service-oriented integration that are seen as a means to couple applications and foster the agile enterprise. Enterprise messaging systems have been used for years because they provide reliable transfer of information across heterogeneous networks and applications. Message-oriented middleware (MOM) is the foundation of several commercial message broker products that provide intelligent routing semantics among disparate applications. Application program interface standards such as the Java Message Service help alleviate some vendor dependency at the programming level. Lack of MOM interoperability is a problem for systems that require asynchronous message integration across a wide area network in which corporate or government boundaries in various business units have standardized on different MOM providers. The lack of asynchronous transport standardization adds to the MOM interoperability problem and increases the cost of integration. Traditional MOM products, MOM-based message brokers, integration brokers, and enterprise service buses will likely remain high on the list of integration solution technologies.