Message-Oriented Middleware Systems: Technology Overview

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed analysis of open-source message-oriented middleware systems, highlighting their features, evolution, and potential for community consolidation, supported by a publicly available dataset.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive characterization of ten MOM systems, identifying key features and evolution trends, and introduces a publicly available dataset for further research and comparison.

Findings

MOM systems have evolved to support cloud applications with high flexibility.

They offer core features like transaction support, active messaging, and multi-tenancy.

Community efforts could be consolidated into fewer open-source projects.

Abstract

We present a comprehensive characterization study of open-source message-oriented middleware (MOM) systems. We followed a rigorous methodology to select and study ten popular and diverse MOM systems. For each system, we examine 42 features with a total of 134 different options. We found that MOM systems have evolved to provide a framework for modern cloud applications through high flexibility and configurability and by offering core building blocks for complex applications including transaction support, active messaging, resource management, flow control, and native support for multi-tenancy. We also identify that there is an opportunity for the community to consolidate its efforts on fewer open-source projects. We have also created an annotated data set that makes it easy to verify our findings, which can also be used to help practitioners and developers understand and compare the features of different systems. For a wider impact, we make our data set publicly available.