Message oriented middleware

Message oriented middleware (MOM) is software or hardware infrastructure supporting the sending and receiving of messages between distributed systems. Because businesses, institutions, and technologies change continually, the software systems that serve them must be able to accommodate such changes. Following a merger, the addition of a service, or the expansion of available services, a business can ill afford to recreate its information systems. It is at this most critical point that it needs to integrate new components or to scale existing ones as efficiently as possible. The easiest way to integrate heterogeneous components is not to recreate them as homogeneous elements but to provide a layer that allows them to communicate despite their differences. This layer, called middleware, allows software components (applications, enterprise java beans, servlets, and other components) that have been developed independently and that run on different networked platforms to interact with one another. It is when this interaction is possible that the network can become the computer.