Middleware technologies have become increasingly important for integrating heterogeneous systems and enabling information exchange between distributed applications. These middleware platforms handle complex interactions by facilitating communication, harmonizing information formats, monitoring processes, and orchestrating workflows across disparate components.
Messaging and Streaming Middleware
One core responsibility of middleware is message passing between systems. Messaging middleware supports asynchronous communication using queues that buffer application messages. This allows decoupling of sender and receiver for improved flexibility, scalability, and fault tolerance. Leading messaging platforms like IBM MQ and RabbitMQ provide queuing and publish/subscribe models for one-way and request-response interactions.
Streaming Integration & Orchestration Middleware handles real-time data integration requirements. Technologies such as Apache Kafka focus on reliably ingesting and distributing streaming data at massive volumes and velocities. They store messages in distributed commit logs that applications can consume from beginning to end. This pub-sub architecture is well-suited for capturing events, telemetry, and other time-series data from IoT and edge devices.
Integration Middleware
To enable data sharing across organizational boundaries, integration & orchestration middleware translates data representations and calls between different platforms, databases, applications, and protocols. Enterprise application integration (EAI) products like IBM WebSphere, TIBCO, and Informatica PowerCenter provide pre-built connectors and mapping capabilities.
Newer integration platforms as a service (iPaaS) take a cloud-native approach, focusing on simpler deployment, elastically scalable connectivity, and low-code integration development. These include Zapier, Dell Boomi, and MuleSoft Anypoint. A key value is facilitating integration between SaaS/PaaS applications and on-premises systems without extensive coding expertise.
API Management and Service Orchestration
As microservices and APIs become the fundamental units of business logic and information exchange, API management platforms fill a vital middleware role. They centrally publish, secure, monitor and govern all application programming interfaces. Leading vendors like Apigee, Kong and 3scale offer capabilities such as endpoint protection, policy enforcement, analytics, and developer portals.
Service orchestration middleware coordinates interactions between loosely-coupled constituent services, simplifying composition of sophisticated multi-step processes and workflows. Java Business Integration (JBI)-compliant engines like Fuse Mediation Router and Mule ESB define service topologies, handle data routing, implement logic through human-readable policies, and ensure reliable execution across services.
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