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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T07:19:14+00:00

Every description on the Message Bus architecture seems to describe a centralised intermediary for

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Every description on the Message Bus architecture seems to describe a centralised intermediary for routing messages:

Each application has a single connection to the message bus instead
of multiple dedicated connections to each of the other applications.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff647328.aspx

Structure the connecting middleware between these applications as a
Message Bus that enables them to work together using messaging.

http://www.eaipatterns.com/MessageBus.html

Service Bus is messaging infrastructure that sits between applications
allowing them to exchange messages in a loosely coupled way for
improved scale and resiliency.

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/messaging/

The descriptions seem identical to the Message Broker architecture; leading me to believe the following:

The term ‘Message Bus’ is effectively the same as ‘MoM’ – a generic term for referring to a messaging infrastructure without explicitly mentioning a topology. I.e. Message Broker is a type of Message Bus.

This seems like a controversial topic, and whilst there’s a few similar questions on SO, none have (IMO) definitive answers.

P.s. I am aware that Enterprise Service Bus is entirely different, and is effectively a ‘feature rich’ MoM.

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  1. Editorial Team

    You are right, this area of terminology is very messy and there are no definitive answer, but this is my view from my professional life:

    The first thing is to do is to think about this in different levels of abstractions – architectural concepts vs products.

    A message bus (http://www.eaipatterns.com/MessageBus.html) is often referd to a as an architectural princip to decouple applications often together with canonical data formats (http://www.eaipatterns.com/CanonicalDataModel.html), much regardless of technology. Often implemented using MoM products.

    A MoM typically refers to a family of middleware products that implements asynchronous message passing. Often built supporting standards such as JMS and AMQP (typically WebSphere MQ, ActiveMQ, Azure messaging, hornetQ, RabbitMQ, etc.etc.).

    A message broker is often a MoM, and both terms are used for the same messaging product. There might be confusion here, since the main ESB product of IBM is called WebSphere Message Broker while it rather an ESB used side by side with the MoM product – WebSphere MQ. Usually most MoM call themselves brokers, such as RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, QPid etc.

    Hope this did not cause more confusion 🙂

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