RSBA Technology

This is the 3rd in the series of messaging - related articles.

Build a Logical Message Bus

The messaging infrastructure supports the creation of a messaging topology and provides messaging – level services (guaranteed delivery, messaging resilience, WAN bridging etc). However, there is still a significant functional gap between that and the application domain-level code that developers and the business wish to spend most attention on.

A shared common layer can be built that abstracts the messaging infrastructure from Service Component application code, and provides further services:

• Topology configuration (e.g. converting message topology configuration into behaviour and state).
• Topic building (e.g. using a Builder Pattern implementation)
• Component resiliency (warm standby, round - robin)
• Inter-component heartbeating
• Test injection / mocking for unit testing
• Message performance monitoring
• Presents a messaging API to application code that abstracts the implementation of the messaging layer, allowing possibility of heterogeneous messaging architectures to be utilized to extract maximum performance.
• Implements the messaging-level protocol(s) used for message creation and bundling (the actual wire byte protocol would be determined by the messaging infrastructure itself).
• Provides a common point of control for messaging functionality across all components.

The combination of these services effectively creates a logical message bus (although the underlying messaging topology may be one or more of many different types and implementations, and not formally recognized as a “bus” at all).

This shared code becomes a critical part of meeting the System’s performance objectives, and, as such, requires the oversight of senior technical development personnel in its design and development.