April 02, 2012 - By Marc Neeley, OCI Principal Software Engineer
Middleware News Brief (MNB) features news and technical information about Open Source middleware technologies.
In the course of developing systems, it is often necessary to integrate components that are built using different communication mechanisms. This situation can arise for many reasons:
- Differing requirements
- Constraints imposed by the associated subsystems that must be integrated
- Different skillsets within the organization
- Legacy systems that were developed prior to emerging new standards
- ... and others
A common approach to resolving this situation is to employ a messaging bridge. A messaging bridge connects multiple message channels, managing the connections details and message translation between the channels.
When developing a messaging bridge, you will need to map concepts in each of the communication paradigms. Ideally you would use communication approaches that are in the same family (e.g., Publish/Subscribe, Client Server, Remote Procedure Call, etc.).
In this middleware-focused SETT article, we present a use case in which two modern, message-oriented middleware frameworks must be integrated:
- Extensible Messaging Presence Protocol (XMPP)
- The Data Distribution Service (DDS) for real-time systems
Our main objective is to illustrate the considerations in developing a messaging bridge in general, as well as its application specifically through the use of XMPP and DDS messaging frameworks.
Software Engineering Tech Trends (SETT) is a regular publication featuring emerging trends in software engineering.
