Message Bus

A message bus specializes in transporting messages between applications. A message bus contains three key elements:

    * A set of agreed-upon message schemas
    * A set of common command messages [Hohpe04]
    * A shared infrastructure for sending bus messages to recipients

When you use a message bus, an application that sends a message no longer has individual connections to all the applications that must receive the message. Instead, the application merely passes the message to the message bus, and the message bus transports the message to all the other applications that are listening for bus messages through a shared infrastructure. Likewise, an application that receives a message no longer obtains it directly from the sender. Instead, it takes the message from the message bus. In effect, the message bus reduces the fan-out of each application from many to one.

Usually, the bus does not preserve message ordering. Internal optimizations, routing, buffering, or even the underlying transport mechanism might affect how the messages travel to the receiving applications. Therefore, the order in which messages reach each receiver is nondeterministic.

See: Prescriptive Architecture Message Bus