A Study of the Capabilities of Message-Oriented Middleware Systems

Abstract

We present a comprehensive characterization study of open-source Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) systems. We devised a rigorous methodology to select and study 10 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. A key result of our study, is that we believe 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 determine and understand the features of different systems. For a wider impact, our data set is publicly available at [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HrZ7ub19FuuBzA5z4aA6RfR5vnkdnm0bg3hxfADspEA/edit?usp=sharing].