RESTful Messaging – Your New Favorite Technology Mashup

It used to be pretty easy to pick the technology you’d use to connect applications to information sources, services and people.

• If you were developing an enterprise application to manage inventory in your supply chain or automating some business process, calling upon multiple internal systems and databases, you’d use messaging middleware like JMS, MQ, or Solace.
• If you were building a web or cloud app aimed at mobile workers or end users, on the other hand you’d use app servers, open source tools and REST/HTTP to move the data.

But increasingly, most applications look like “all of the above.” A corporate mobile app might need information from several back-end data sources to support a field sales team. And an Internet of Things application may push data over the wireless internet to cloud-based storage and an internal big data store so it can be analyzed by a CEP engine. Which is the best choice then – a messaging architecture, or a REST-based web architecture? And if the answer is “both, ” how will you bridge the two environments to pass state and semantics?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have both environments work together seamlessly, getting the best of both worlds? That’s what we’ve enabled with the new 7.1 release of SolOS, the software and firmware that makes up the Solace platform.  By supporting REST over HTTP within our message broker and letting you map REST posts to the features of a message bus, we give architects and developers their cake and enough forks to enjoy a sustained sugar high.

The value of such a platform depends on where you’re coming from:

• Web-oriented architects will appreciate the fact that we’re making REST and HTTP first-class citizens on the world’s highest capacity message bus. This means REST-initiated data can take advantage of publish/subscribe or request/reply delivery, persistence for guaranteed delivery, and easy access to anything hanging off a message bus, such as JMS.
  Learn more by reading this blog post Bringing Messaging to REST Applications.
• Messaging-oriented architects will like their newfound ability to extend that well-established feature-rich environment to far reaching endpoints like web consumers, mobile apps and “things” like sensors and control systems, all with a “zero footprint install” and the scale and reliability you expect from Solace.
  Learn more by reading my other blog post Adding REST to your Message Bus

Thanks to this release something that has always been a key decision – messaging or HTTP – is now an unnecessary choice. Each architectures is good at solving a different kind of problem, and together they can each take care of what it does best while giving developers the flexibility to build the next generation of high volume and high value applications.

You can also find out more about SolOS 7.1 here.