Message Broker for Custom Messaging Protocols?

Question

Is there any framework or platform that is providing message exchange in reliable, flexible, and scalable manner? Where I have the following scenario:

I have external devices exchanging messages with our system. These devices are actually not identical and multiple sets have their own specific protocol. What I'm looking for is a middle layer platform or framework (Message Broker or ESB) works as a highly flexible integration solution to support different protocols with no change to our entire system. Meanwhile, I have to ensure reliability and scalability throughout the overall system architecture.

The system that the devices will exchange messages with is written in .Net. Yet, I would like to know the possibility to use that message exchange platform to interact with a Java or PHP system as well.

I read about Apache family i.e. ActiveMQ, Camel and ServiceMix as well as Microsoft Biztalk. But I could not decide what is applicable for the above case as I have never used any of them nor have deep knowledge in such technologies.

Answer 1

We've been using ActiveMQ message broker to implement integration point between multiple .Net and Java apps. ActiveMQ is built upon JMS (Java Message Service) specification and provides a set of APIs and libraries to be used in different development environments (ApacheNMS for .Net)

JMS standard allows any application/device to be a subscriber or publisher via provided API, so no matter what your software is built with it can send/receive messages from the broker by calling the specified API.

AMQ is an open source project, therefore it is free. It has an active development community that tends to be quite responsive to their users.

We've spent some time to get AMQ configured as we wished and now we successfully run master-slave broker configuration that was tested and ensures the proper failover if one broker goes down. This guarantees high availability that is essential for our business.

Answer 2

IBM Integration Bus will do all of this.