What is HornetQ: Messaging Concepts
4.1. Messaging Concepts Messaging systems allow you to loosely couple heteregenous systems together, whilst typically providing reliability, transactions and many other features. Unlike systems based on a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) pattern, messaging systems primarily use an asynchronous message passing pattern with no tight relationship between requests and responses. Most messaging systems also support a request-response mode but this is not a primary feature of messaging systems. Designing systems to be asynchronous from end-to-end allows you to really take advantage of your hardware resources, minimizing the amount of threads blocking on IO operations, and to use your network bandwidth to its full capacity. With an RPC approach you have to wait for a response for each request you make so are limited by the network round trip time, or latency of your network. With an asynchronous system you can pipeline flows of messages in different directions, so are limited by the network bandwidth not the latency. This typically allows you to create much higher performance applications. Messaging systems decouple the senders of messages from the consumers of messages. The senders and consumers of messages are completely independent and know nothing of each other. This allows you to create flexible, loosely coupled systems. Often, large enterprises use a messaging system to implement a message bus which loosely couples heterogeneous systems together. Message buses often form the core of an Enterprise Service Bus. (ESB). Using a message bus to de-couple disparate systems can allow the system to grow and adapt more easily. It also allows more flexibility to add new systems or retire old ones since they don't have brittle dependencies on each other.